Before there were glass furnaces, mine tipples or a Main Street, the bluffs above the Vermilion River were open prairie crossed by a stubborn river. This page looks at the years when a rough trading post grew into a chartered town, picking up a few names along the way. For the big-picture story, start at our Streator history overview.
Surveyors, Canals and the First Homesteads
The future Streator sat in the orbit of a much larger project. Surveyors working on the Illinois and Michigan Canal, the waterway that would link Lake Michigan to the Illinois River and the Mississippi beyond, reached this part of the Vermilion River in 1824. The canal set off a wave of land speculation along the region’s rivers, and homesteaders were arriving in the area by the 1830s. None of the early clusters of cabins near the future town site turned into a permanent community.
John O’Neill’s Trading Post
That changed in 1861. A man named John O’Neill opened a small trading business near the river, and county historians later pointed to it as the first real settlement in what would become Streator. The little post picked up the name “Hardscrabble.” The usual explanation is a practical one: it was a hard scrabble to get across the Vermilion and climb the hill to where the settlement stood. Whatever the exact origin, the name fit a place where nothing came easily.
The Unionville Years
During the Civil War the settlement took on a second name, Unionville, honoring the Union soldiers of the day. Neither name would survive the next few years, because the land under the town was about to become far more valuable than anyone at the trading post imagined.
Coal Changes Everything
Thick beds of bituminous coal lay close to the surface throughout the region, and demand for coal was climbing fast in the 1860s, especially in Chicago. Investors from the East took notice. In 1866 Ohio physician and railroad developer Worthy S. Streator organized the Vermilion Coal Company to open mines here, and he sent his relative, Colonel Ralph Plumb, to run the operation. Plumb arrived in Hardscrabble in February 1866, platted a town, and began sinking mine shafts. You can read more about both men on our pages about Worthy S. Streator and Colonel Ralph Plumb.
A Charter in 1868 and a City in 1882
The new mining town received its charter in 1868 and took the name Streator in honor of the coal company’s president, a man who, by most accounts, never visited the place. Growth was startling. The 1870 census counted 1,486 residents; by 1880 the figure was 5,157, and by 1890 it was 11,414. Streator incorporated as a city in 1882 and elected Ralph Plumb its first mayor.
Writing in 1877, LaSalle County historian H. F. Kett marveled at how quickly the place had grown, describing how a settlement that began with a single small store had become a city of about 6,000 people with churches, schools, business blocks and fine homes in roughly a decade.
Growing Into a City
The population kept climbing after cityhood. Streator counted 14,079 people in 1900 and reached its all-time peak of 16,868 in 1960. The 2020 census recorded about 12,500 residents. Mines, then glass factories, then the railroads that served both, account for most of that growth.
What Remains of Hardscrabble
The old names never disappeared entirely. “Hardscrabble” still turns up in local storytelling and newspaper features, and the Unionville name lives on in local history writing. The trading post itself is long gone, but the pattern it set, newcomers arriving to work hard on difficult ground, ran through every chapter that followed, from the coal mining era to the glass factories.
Related Streator History
- Streator History Overview
- Dr. Worthy S. Streator: The Man the City Is Named For
- Colonel Ralph Plumb: Streator's Founder and First Mayor
- Streator's Coal Mining Era: The Vermilion Coal Company and Its Miners
Sources
- Streator, Illinois – Wikipedia (History section). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streator,_Illinois
- H. F. Kett, The Past and Present of LaSalle County, Illinois (1877), as quoted in Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streator,_Illinois
- Worthy S. Streator – Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worthy_S._Streator
- U.S. Census population figures for Streator (via Wikipedia demographics table). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streator,_Illinois#Demographics
