In the seventeenth century, the Illiniwek tribes (also referred to as the Illinois Confederation) were a group of 12 or 13 separate indigenous tribes that had a similar language and culture. The tribes with ancestral lands in the Orland region were the Illinois and Ho-Chunk. The Potawatomi arrived in the Chicago and Illinois River area from Detroit by 1743. According to “Chicagoland Indian Trails of 1804,” a map made by Albert Scharf in 1900, there was an Indigenous camp in Orland, likely near Orland Lake (present-day McGinnis Slough) in the early 1800s.

In the spring of 1832, Sauk warrior Black Hawk led a group of approximately 1,500 Sauk, Meshwaki, and Kickapoo People over the Mississippi and into Illinois. While some historians believe his motivation was to attack against the government and white settlement, modern historians question this, pointing to the fact that he travelled with a large group of non-combatants. This suggests the possibility that he may have been trying to resettle his people among the Ho-Chunk or other tribes in the area.

The Governor of Illinois, John Reynolds, viewed this as an invasion of the state, as Black Hawk had reportedly mobilized a militia and refused to leave. The Army opened fire on May 14, 1832; in response, Black Hawk’s “British Band” attacked members of the Illinois militia in the Battle of Stillman’s Run later that day. In the aftermath of this attack, the press reported that a bloodthirsty group of warriors was travelling across northern Illinois. Out of fear of invading native tribes, white settlers in the Chicagoland area fled to Fort Dearborn for protection, although Black Hawk never approached the Chicago area. Black Hawk surrendered on August 27, thus ending the conflict.

The Black Hawk war marked the end of large-scale Native resistance to white expansion efforts in this area of the United States. This led to the Indian removal policy – an ethnic cleansing of Indigenous People from their ancestral Homelands to Land west of the Mississippi. In the Treaty of Chicago in 1833, the Chippewa, Odawa, and Potawatomi were required to cede 5,000,000 acres of Land in Illinois, Wisconsin, and Michigan. This treaty fell under the Indian Removal Act. Many, if not all, of the Indigenous People in Illinois were removed from the state because of this treaty.

The 1833 Treaty of Chicago opened up land to white settlers in Illinois. There is no known record of white people settling in Orland Park until after the Treaty of Chicago. Deacon William Bandle, veteran of the War of 1812, and his family may be the first pioneer settlers to live in what would become Orland Township. According to an interview conducted by the Canton Weekly Review and published on December 14, 1905, George Washington Bandle, son of William and Lydia Bandle, discussed his family history. He notes that his mother and father arrived in Chicago, from New York, in 1833. Land records indicate that he purchased 156.82 acres on June 10, 1835. This was the earliest date of any recorded land purchases in the township. It is certainly possible that William Bandle was already “squatting” on the land prior to the purchase. This was a common practice wherever Federal Lands were sure to be made available for public sale.

In the 1830s and 40s, more families from England and Germany began to arrive. The area became known as the English Settlement (not Orland), though they had yet to start building more than homesteads. This was located near the present-day Orland Square Mall. Over the next few years, the settlers built a one-room schoolhouse in 1849, a church, a post office (located in settler Alanson St. Clair’s home), and a general store for families to buy items for farming, business, and their homes.

On April 2, 1850, Orland Township was organized in Centre School and William Jackson was elected Township Supervisor. The first township election was held, and 31 votes were held. The population at this time was 504 (285 men and 219 women). The first road was laid out during the Highway Commissioners' meeting. It was built running diagonally from 143rd Street and Wolf Road to 151st Street and West Avenue.

The company that laid tracks through Orland was the Wabash, St. Louis, and Pacific Railroad, which formed on November 11, 1879. On August 1, 1889, the name changed simply to the Wabash Railroad. The railroad operated within the mid-central United States, with tracks through Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Iowa, Michigan, and Missouri. Most importantly for Orland, one of their planned lines would go from Chicago to Decatur and St. Louis with a stop in Orland.

After hearing the news, Orland Township Supervisor and Illinois State Representative John Humphrey purchased a large plot of land near the proposed tracks. One year later, a train depot was constructed on Union Avenue in 1880, officially making Orland a stop on the line. The train depot was originally named Sedgwick, but soon after, the name was changed to Orland after the name of the town.

After a few weeks' delay, on August 8, 1880, the first passenger service began in Orland. While there were three daily express passenger trains running on this line, they only passed through Orland without stopping. The train that stopped in Orland was the all-stop local passenger train that departed Decatur for Chicago every weekday morning and returned every weekday evening. From 1880 to 1893, this was the only passenger train out of Orland; in April 1893, according to a newspaper article from the Chicago Tribune, Wabash added two additional suburban trains between Chicago and Orland.

In 1892, Orland Park was incorporated. The original village limits were 151st Street to the south, 94th Avenue to the east, 143rd Street to the north, and West Avenue to the west. Outside these limits were unincorporated Orland and parts of Orland Township. In 1892, John Humphrey became the first Village President of the newly incorporated Village of Orland Park.

Senator John Humphrey is an important figure in Orland history. He was born in 1838 in Wisbech, Cambridgeshire, England. In 1848, the same year that democratic and liberal rebellions against monarchies swept across Europe, at the age of 10, John emigrated from England to America with his grandparents, his mother, brother, stepsister, and stepbrother. Soon after their arrival, the family settled in Orland on a farm near where the Orland Square Mall currently is. When the Humphrey family arrived in Orland, they settled along present-day 94th Avenue and became farmers. However, Humphrey did not want to continue this agricultural path. He began to pursue political and legal careers in 1867 when he was elected Township Supervisor. John Humphrey ran for the Illinois House of Representatives as a Republican from the 95th district and was elected to office in 1870 for a single term. In 1878, he was admitted to the bar and began his practice in Chicago. He was re-elected in 1884; due to redistricting, during this term, he represented the 7th district. In 1886, he was elected to the Illinois Senate for the 7th district and remained in that position until 1910.

As an adult, John also participated heavily in local politics. He was Orland Township Treasurer for 39 years – from 1876 up until his death in 1914. He handled the finances for Orland Township, including the school finances. He is responsible for the creation of School District 9, now School District 135 so his son could go to school in town. This caused controversy with neighboring schools districts No. 1 & 2, as they would be losing students to the newly created school district - and the tax dollars that go with them.

He served in this position until his death in 1914. From his “house on the hill,” Humphrey walked to Board Meetings at 8:00p.m. every other Monday, and in spite of his concerns in Springfield, he missed very few meetings. Humphrey made sure that Orland Park could compete with any village around and made various improvements to the town. In 1894, he started a Fire Department, bought a fire engine, and constructed an Engine House on Beacon Avenue (Old Village Hall).

The village of Alpine was located north of 167th Street between Wolf Road on the west and 108th Avenue on the east. It was located along Marley Creek and along the west side of the old Wabash, St. Louis and Pacific Railroad tracks, approximately 30 miles southwest of Chicago and three miles southwest of Orland Park, Illinois.

At its zenith in 1912, the town boasted a general store, a blacksmith shop, two saloons, a feed mill, and a large stockyard where livestock came to and from Chicago – often sent to Alpine to be fattened and then shipped back to the Union Stockyards for slaughter. The town also had two schools and the Cumberland Presbyterian Church, founded as early as January 1894. There were only five such churches of this denomination in the Chicagoland area.

Sometime about midnight on November 29, 1912, disaster struck the small town of Alpine, Illinois. An area newspaper reported that an “incendiary blaze perils all Alpine. . .which threatened to wipe out the village of Alpine.” Once the smoke cleared, the townspeople discovered the extent of the blaze’s destruction. The general store, post office, two saloons, and three residences had been destroyed by the fire; the estimated cost of the damages ranged from $15,000 to $50,000. While the Wabash train depot remained standing, the fire dealt a catastrophic blow to the little town of Alpine – one from which it would never recover.

Alpine had existed for more than thirty years prior to its devastating fire. Alpine officially became a Ghost Town on Thursday, September 13th ,1951 when the Illinois State Revenue Department removed Alpine from the (tax revenue) books.

More than 40 years after Alpine was officially decommissioned as a town, a subdivision was created in Orland Park called Alpine Heights. Beginning in 1992, 80 years after the town was destroyed, new homes and townhomes were created utilizing a grid of streets with the same names and organization that the original town had used.

During the 1910s and 1920s, the average day for an Orland farmer began at 5 a.m. The family woke up at the crack of dawn to milk cows and feed the horses working in the fields that day and other livestock. This was all done before breakfast. A typical Orland farmer usually grew barley, wheat, hay, oats and corn, and raised hogs, dairy cattle and chickens. Horse-drawn thresher machines harvest hay, wheat, oats and barley, but farmers picked and husked corn by hand. Early combine harvesters (a machine that cuts and delivers the crop to the thresher) did not appear in Orland until the mid-1930s and were not widely used until the late 1940s and early 1950s. After toiling in the fields for hours, a farmer’s day ended after dark. Then, he woke up the next morning at 5 a.m. to repeat the cycle. There were no days off or sleeping late because the animals needed to be fed at the same time every day.

While Orland farmers kept a good amount of the harvested grain to feed livestock, they took some to grain elevators in Lockport, Tinley Park, Romeoville or Joliet. For a short time, Christ Grosskopf had a grain elevator just east of the depot in Orland. We are uncertain how long it was in service.

Farmers left milk overnight in a milkhouse and brought it the next day to local creameries to sell. At the southwest corner of 143rd Street and Ravinia Avenue, there was the Orland Creamery, incorporated in 1905 by Dr. Walter R. Paddock, Christ Yunker, and John T. Cooper. It opened no later than January, 1907. Six months later, The Dowd Pure Milk Co. takes over ownership and begins bottling milk and ceasing the making of butter. Later, a local branch of Capital Dairy, a dairy supply company that sold Orland products outside of the village. According to The Orland Story, here were two dairies in Orland that sold products locally: Koehler’s dairy farm on 143rd Street across from I.N.R. Beatty Lumber Yard, and John Creer’s dairy, who sold his products with his son, Joseph. Both dairies brought products door-to-door to their customers.

By the late 1920s, tractors were fairly common on Orland farms. In addition, numerous other agricultural advancements made their way to Orland during this period, such as trucks beginning to replace horses to take goods to market; electricity reaching farms in the 1930s and indoor plumbing being common by the mid-1930s; and rudimentary combines appearing in the area in the 1930s but not gaining widespread use until the 1940s.

Orland’s farmscape changed after World War II. In 1946, Orland Park had 15,629 acres of farmland, which increased in value as the Township made new improvements to sewer and water systems. This increase in value, combined with high land taxes in the area, led to many farmers making the decision to sell their land to secure their future finances. The post-WWII period marks the decline of Orland’s farming community but the growth of Orland Park as a suburb.

One such change was the construction of Carl Sandburg High School. On May 5, 1952, voters of Orland and Palos Townships voted to combine high school districts District #221 and District #222 into a single, consolidated high school. This would later become District #230. Construction of the first District #230 high school began May 1953 at 131st Street and LaGrange Road in Palos Township. On September 7, 1954, classes were in session at Carl Sandburg High School, named after the famous poet and author. District #230 wanted to choose a name for the first high school that honored a living person who made a great contribution to education. The district chose Carl Sandburg. On October 10, 1954, the author came to the school’s opening dedication. He continued to visit the school every two years up until his death in 1967.

Another important development in putting Orland Park on the map was the arrival of Andrew Corporation. Andrew Corporation was originally founded by Victor J. Andrew in Chicago in 1936. In 1947, Andrew Corporation built a 15,000 square foot building on 153rd street and moved their headquarters to Orland Park due to its location near Chicago and its proximity to the Wabash and Rock Island train routes. It was a hardware manufacturer for communications networks that played a large role in the development of numerous wireless communication technologies. They manufactured communications infrastructure for the United States Military, worked as engineers for Chicago’s WBKB TV station, and worked in Russia after the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991 to help sustain the St. Petersburg metro, ATMs, and phone service.

The presence of Andrew Corporation in Orland Park helped the small suburb quickly grow. Workers and their families moved to Orland and numerous jobs opened up. While perceptions of Andrew Corporation were mixed when they first came to Orland, they quickly became an integral part of the community. Andrew Corporation used their Orland Park location as their global headquarters in 2007. In 2007, Andrew Corporation was acquired by CommScope and Andrew’s headquarters on 153rd Street closed.

Thirdly, the construction of Orland Square Mall and Orland Park Place in the 1970s helped Orland grow. On March 15, 1976, Orland Square Shopping Center, or Orland Square Mall, opened. It was the largest mall in the Chicago Southland. The four major stores in the mall on opening day were Carson Pirie Scott, Sears, JCPenney, and Marshall Field's. Orland Park Place was formerly known as Orland Court. Development began in July 1979 and it was originally planned as an enclosed shopping mall. Some of the first stores include Montgomery Ward, Wieboldt's, and Sportmart. In 1985, it was renamed to "Orland Park Place," and in 1999, it was redeveloped into an outdoor mall that we see today.

The final contributing factor to Orland's growth was the acquisition of Lake Michigan water from well water on January 24, 1985. According to the Chicago Tribune, "the Village received [Lake Michigan] water through a 36-inch water main from the village of Oak Lawn." This was a large reason why many residents chose to move to Orland Park over other southwest suburbs of Chicago. It also aided in commercial and industrial development in the area.