Illinois historical timeline

Illinois's history runs through Chicago's rise but does not start there: a thousand years ago the largest city north of Mexico stood on the Mississippi River floodplain, and the state's first capital, its first European town and its first state fair were all downstate. What a visitor sees -- Monks Mound, the French fort sites, the Lincoln Home, the Water Tower that survived the fire, the White City's one surviving palace, the L, the Pullman town -- is the record.

Chronology

1. c. 1050–1350 Cahokia, across the Mississippi River from St. Louis, grows to 15,000–20,000 people and about 120 earthworks, the largest and most influential city of the Mississippian culture and larger than any later American city until Philadelphia in the 1780s; it is abandoned by 1350.
2. 1673 Marquette and Jolliet come down the Illinois River guided by the Kaskaskia; Marquette founds the state's first mission in 1675, La Salle and Tonti build forts at Peoria in 1680 and on Starved Rock in 1682, and Peoria, founded in 1691, becomes the oldest permanent European settlement; the Illinois confederation numbers over 10,000.
3. 1763 France cedes the Illinois Country to Britain; George Rogers Clark claims it for Virginia in 1778; it joins the Northwest Territory in 1787, becomes a territory in 1809 with its capital at Kaskaskia, and on 3 December 1818 the 21st state, its northern border pushed up to give it Lake Michigan shoreline and the Chicago River.
4. 1824 Voters reject legalising slavery, 6,640 to 4,972, though some 900 enslaved people remain; the capital moves to Vandalia in 1819 and, on the motion of a young legislator named Abraham Lincoln, to Springfield in 1837; the Black Hawk War of 1832 ends with the last native lands ceded and fewer than 300 indigenous people left in one village.
5. 1848 The Illinois and Michigan Canal and the first railroad open the same year and make Chicago, incorporated in 1837, the fastest-growing city in the world; the Board of Trade invents the futures contract; Nauvoo, the Mormon city, briefly outgrows Chicago in 1844; Galena's lead rush, the first mineral rush in the country, peaks with 10,000 people.
6. 1858 Lincoln and Stephen Douglas debate slavery seven times across the state; Lincoln wins the presidency in 1860 and leaves Springfield in 1861; Illinois raises 150 infantry regiments and Grant's Galena for the war; the Union Stock Yards open in 1865 and slaughter the nation's beef until 1971.
7. 1871 On 8–10 October the Great Fire kills about 300 people, destroys 17,000 buildings and leaves 100,000 homeless; the city rebuilds in steel, invents the skyscraper and hosts the World's Columbian Exposition of 1893 for 21 million visitors; the L opens in 1892 and the river is reversed by 1900.
8. 1894 The Pullman strike shuts the railroads; the Great Migration brings the blues north, Muddy Waters arriving in 1943; Route 66 starts from Chicago in 1926; the Tri-State tornado kills 613 Illinoisans in 1925; O'Hare becomes the world's busiest airport in 1963 and the Sears Tower the world's tallest building in 1973.
9. 1995 A July heat wave kills 739 in Chicago; the Great Flood of 1993 drowns the river towns; Millennium Park opens in 2004; Barack Obama, a state senator, is elected president in 2008 and the Cubs end a 108-year wait in 2016; Pope Leo XIV, born in Chicago, becomes the first American pope.

What survived, and how

Cahokia survived because it was earth and too big to plough away; Kaskaskia did not, because the river moved. The Water Tower survived the fire because it was stone; the fair's fine-arts palace survived because Marshall Field's museum moved into it. The Lincoln Home survived because his son gave it to the state on condition it stay free forever. The prairie did not survive, except in cemeteries, railway verges and the restorations at Midewin. The L survived because the city kept investing in it when other cities tore theirs down.