History of Streator, Illinois

From Hardscrabble to Streator

Every town has an origin story, and Streator’s begins with a rough-edged frontier settlement on the banks of the Vermilion River in La Salle County. Long before the brick storefronts of Main Street and the smokestacks of the glass works, the land here was open prairie cut by a winding river and timbered bluffs. Native peoples, including the Potawatomi and Kickapoo, knew the Vermilion valley well, and the river’s name itself echoes the reddish clay of its banks.

The settlement that would become Streator took shape around 1861, when John O’Neill opened a small trading post near the river. It was the sort of place that served farmers, travelers and the handful of families scratching out a living nearby. The early community went by a name that captured its hard beginnings: Hardscrabble. The name was honest, describing a settlement where making a living was a daily struggle, and it stuck for years in local memory even after more dignified names replaced it.

During the Civil War era the settlement was also known as Unionville, a name reflecting the patriotic mood of northern Illinois at the time. Neither name would last. What changed the town’s fortunes was the discovery of rich seams of bituminous coal beneath the Vermilion valley, and the arrival of investors who saw an opportunity to turn a sleepy river crossing into an industrial town.

Chief among those investors was Dr. Worthy S. Streator, a physician and businessman from Cleveland, Ohio, who helped finance coal mining and railroad development in the area. Streator himself never settled in the town, but his money and connections were essential, and the community honored him by taking his name. It’s a quirk of Illinois history that one of the state’s best-known industrial towns is named for a man who spent most of his life elsewhere.

The man on the ground was Colonel Ralph Plumb, a Union Army veteran and Ohio native who came west to manage the coal interests backed by Dr. Streator. Plumb is widely regarded as the founder of the modern city. He laid out streets, promoted the town to settlers and businesses, helped bring in rail connections, and later served as the town’s first mayor and as a U.S. congressman. A monument to Colonel Plumb still stands in Streator City Park, a reminder of how much the town owes to his energy and ambition.

In 1868 the community was formally chartered and took the name Streator, the date that appears on the city’s seal and on many local commemorations, including the city’s 150th-anniversary celebrations in 2018. Growth came fast once the mines opened and the railroads arrived. By 1882 Streator had grown large enough to reorganize as a city, a milestone that marked its transformation from a mining camp into one of the most important industrial communities in north-central Illinois.

Within a single generation, the place once mocked as Hardscrabble had become a bustling city with churches, schools, newspapers, an opera house and a downtown that drew shoppers from farms and villages for miles around. That rapid rise set the tone for everything that followed in Streator’s history: a town built by hard work, outside capital and the labor of thousands of newcomers.

A Town Built on Coal

Coal made Streator. The bituminous seams under the Vermilion valley were among the most productive in northern Illinois, and the mines that opened in the late 1860s and 1870s needed far more workers than the local farm population could supply. The answer was immigration. Miners and their families came from England, Wales, Scotland and Ireland in the early years, followed by waves of newcomers from Germany, Sweden, Italy, Poland, Slovakia, Lithuania and elsewhere in central and eastern Europe.

The numbers tell the story of a boomtown. In 1870, just two years after the charter, Streator counted about 1,486 residents. By 1890 the population had soared to roughly 11,414, a nearly eightfold increase in two decades. Neighborhoods grew up around the mine shafts, and each immigrant group brought its own churches, social halls, benevolent societies and grocery stores. The result was one of the most ethnically diverse small cities in the Midwest.

Faith was central to those communities, and Streator’s church history reflects its immigrant roots. St. Stephen’s Catholic Church, founded in 1883, is recognized as the first Slovak Catholic parish in the United States, a remarkable distinction for a prairie mining town. Polish, Italian, German, Irish and Lithuanian Catholics, along with Methodists, Baptists, Lutherans, Presbyterians and others, all built congregations here, and many of those church buildings still shape the city’s skyline.

Mining was dangerous, exhausting work. Men and boys spent long days underground for modest wages, and accidents, cave-ins and lung disease took a steady toll. Streator miners were active in the labor movement, joining unions and taking part in strikes that sought better pay and safer conditions. The city’s labor tradition runs deep; Streator native Reuben Soderstrom went on to lead the Illinois State Federation of Labor for decades, and a statue in City Park honors him.

The coal boom could not last forever. As the easily reached seams were exhausted and cheaper coal became available from southern Illinois and other regions, the Streator mines began to close one by one in the early twentieth century. Some held on through the Depression and World War II, but the industry steadily faded. The last mine closed in 1958, ending nearly a century of coal mining in the area. Today the old mine sites are mostly hidden, though slag piles, place names and family stories keep the memory alive. The 150th-anniversary mural at 302 E. Main Street, painted in 2018, pays tribute to the miners who built the city.

Even as coal declined, the immigrant families it attracted stayed, and their children and grandchildren moved into new industries, especially the glass factories that had been growing alongside the mines. Coal gave Streator its people; glass would give it a worldwide reputation.

Glass Container Capital of the World

If coal made Streator, glass made it famous. For much of the twentieth century the city proudly called itself the Glass Container Capital of the World, and for good reason: at its height, Streator’s factories turned out an enormous share of the bottles and jars used across America.

Geology set the stage. The area sits near deposits of St. Peter sandstone, an exceptionally pure silica sand ideal for glassmaking. Combine that sand with cheap local coal for fuel and good rail connections for shipping, and Streator had nearly everything a glass manufacturer could want.

The industry took root in 1881 with the founding of the Streator Bottle & Glass Company. Among its backers was Adolphus Busch, the St. Louis brewing magnate behind Anheuser-Busch, who needed a steady supply of beer bottles. Busch’s involvement tied the young factory to one of the fastest-growing businesses in the country, and Streator bottles soon traveled far beyond Illinois.

Other companies followed. Over the decades Streator was home to plants operated by or later merged into firms such as Thatcher Glass and Anchor Hocking/Anchor Glass, the American Bottle Company, and Owens-Illinois (later O-I Glass, operating locally as Owens-Brockway). The city’s factories made milk bottles, beer and soda bottles, food jars and countless other containers.

A key figure in this story is Michael J. Owens, the inventor of the automatic bottle-making machine. Before Owens, bottles were largely blown by hand by skilled glassblowers, often with child helpers. His machine, introduced in the early 1900s, could produce bottles continuously and uniformly, revolutionizing the industry and helping end child labor in glass factories. Owens’ companies became major players in Streator, and his technology made the city’s high-volume production possible.

At the industry’s peak, Streator’s glass plants employed roughly 4,000 workers, making glass the backbone of the local economy for generations. Families often had several members working at “the glass house,” and the rhythm of shifts and furnace work shaped daily life in town.

Like many American manufacturing centers, Streator felt the pressure of automation, consolidation, plastic packaging and global competition in the late twentieth century. Plants closed or shrank, and employment fell sharply. The final chapter came recently: the Owens-Brockway plant on N. Shabbona Street, which traced its roots to the 1881 Streator Bottle & Glass Company, had cut back to one furnace in 2022 and permanently stopped commercial production on or after November 18, 2024, affecting about 152 workers. It marked the end of more than 140 years of continuous glassmaking in the city. The “Glass Container Capital” mural at 127 S. Bloomington Street keeps that legacy in public view.

The Vermilion River

The Vermilion River is the natural thread that ties Streator together. Flowing northwest toward its meeting with the Illinois River near Oglesby, it cuts through the city in a valley lined with bluffs and woods. In the early days the river was a barrier to cross and a source of water; later, bridges and rail lines spanned it as the city expanded on both banks.

The river has also shown its power. Heavy rains have repeatedly pushed the Vermilion out of its banks. The best-documented example is the flood of July 1951: on the night of July 8, a slow-moving line of thunderstorms dropped more than 13 inches of rain in six hours on parts of McLean, Woodford and Livingston counties, upstream of Streator. The Illinois State Water Survey reported that the resulting floods on the Vermilion and Mackinaw basins set new record flows at nine of eleven stream gauges. Floods like that one help explain why the city’s oldest neighborhoods sit on higher ground above the valley floor.

Today the Vermilion is better known as a recreational asset. The river is a favorite with paddlers, and the stretch downstream toward Matthiessen State Park and the Illinois River is considered one of the more scenic and lively paddling rivers in northern Illinois, with riffles, rock outcrops and wooded canyon walls. Water levels vary greatly with the season, so paddlers should check conditions and local outfitters before heading out. Anglers, birders and hikers also enjoy the river corridor, and nearby Starved Rock and Matthiessen state parks make Streator a convenient base for exploring the Illinois Valley.

Landmarks

Streator’s built landscape reflects its prosperous industrial past, and many landmarks remain at the heart of community life.

Streator City Park is the city’s civic front yard. Laid out in the town’s early years, the park hosts concerts, festivals, holiday displays and farmers markets. It’s home to monuments to Colonel Ralph Plumb and labor leader Reuben Soderstrom, a veterans mural, and a splash pad with children’s murals, making it a living museum of local history.

Facing the park, the Streator Public Library occupies a handsome Classical Revival building funded by steel magnate Andrew Carnegie and opened in 1903. It’s one of the many Carnegie libraries built across America in that era and remains one of downtown’s architectural highlights.

The Majestic Theatre at 119 N. Vermillion Street opened on July 29, 1907, offering “high-class family vaudeville” to a crowd of about 1,000. It hosted stars such as Groucho Marx, Jack Benny and Sophie Tucker before becoming a movie house. The theater was rebuilt in 1921 with its famous facade of 2,100 light bulbs. Over the next century it closed and reopened several times, and it stopped showing films in August 2014. Its marquee is still one of downtown’s best-known sights, and it stands as a symbol of the city’s efforts to bring entertainment back downtown.

The Santa Fe Depot is tied to one of Streator’s proudest stories. During World War II, volunteers, mostly local women, ran the Streator Free Canteen, meeting troop trains passing through on the Santa Fe Railway and handing out sandwiches, coffee, cookies, magazines and kind words to hundreds of thousands of service members. A statue on N. Illinois Street and the 2018 Canteen mural honor that generosity.

Streatorland, the local history museum, preserves artifacts and stories from the coal and glass eras, the railroads, local businesses and notable residents, and it’s an excellent first stop for anyone curious about the city’s past.

In 2018, as part of the city’s 150th anniversary, Streator hosted the Walldogs “Murals and Milestones” festival from June 27 to July 1. About 260 sign and mural artists from 31 states and 11 countries painted 18 murals in four days. Subjects include Clyde Tombaugh and Pluto, Hopalong Cassidy, the Streator-built Roamer automobile, the 1911 Vin Fiz coast-to-coast flight, the railroads, the glass industry, the D.E.W. Line and the Canteen. A downtown mural walk is one of the best free ways to experience the city.

Notable People

For a city of its size, Streator has produced or nurtured a remarkable list of notable people.

Clyde Tombaugh (1906-1997), the astronomer who discovered Pluto in 1930 at Lowell Observatory, was born in Streator. The city celebrates him with murals and a Pluto monument, and it’s a point of pride that the “ninth planet” was found by a hometown son.
Burt Baskin (1913-1967), co-founder of Baskin-Robbins, was born in Streator. The ice cream chain he started with Irv Robbins became famous worldwide for its 31 flavors.
Clarence E. Mulford (1883-1956), born in Streator, wrote the Western stories that created Hopalong Cassidy, later a hugely popular film and television cowboy. A 2018 mural on West Main Street honors him and his creation.
Doug Dieken, a Streator native and University of Illinois star, played offensive tackle for the Cleveland Browns for 14 seasons, earned a Pro Bowl selection and went on to a long career as a Browns broadcaster.
Reuben Soderstrom, longtime president of the Illinois State Federation of Labor (later the Illinois AFL-CIO), began his working life in Streator and is honored with a statue in City Park.
Colonel Ralph Plumb, the city’s founder, first mayor and later a U.S. congressman, shaped the town in its formative years.
Other figures remembered in local murals include minstrel and vaudeville star George “Honey Boy” Evans, racing champion Bob Tattersall, and Elmer Blasco, credited with creating baseball’s Gold Glove award.

The 20th Century to Today

The twentieth century brought both prosperity and hard transitions. In the early 1900s Streator was a busy rail hub served by several lines, including the Santa Fe, the Chicago & Alton and others, and it supported a lively downtown of department stores, banks, hotels and theaters. Local industry diversified beyond glass and coal, and the city even built automobiles: the Roamer car, a stylish early motor car, was produced in Streator for a time, and the city earned a spot in aviation history when Cal Rodgers’ Vin Fiz stopped here during the first transcontinental flight in 1911.

World War II brought the Free Canteen and full employment in the glass plants. After the war, like many Midwestern factory towns, Streator saw jobs decline as coal disappeared, glass production modernized and consolidated, and shopping moved from downtown to highways and, later, the internet. The population peaked in the mid-twentieth century and has gradually declined since, to roughly 12,000 to 13,000 residents in recent counts.

Yet Streator has never lost its sense of identity. Community groups, the Streator Area Chamber of Commerce, local churches and civic clubs have worked to preserve historic buildings, revitalize downtown and attract new employers. The 2018 sesquicentennial and Walldogs festival brought national attention, new public art and fresh pride in the city’s story. OSF HealthCare’s Center for Health, on the former St. Mary’s Hospital campus, keeps outpatient care in town, and small businesses, restaurants and shops continue to anchor Main Street and the surrounding corridors.

The 2024 end of production at the Owens-Brockway plant closed a long chapter, but it also sharpened the community’s focus on what comes next. With affordable housing, easy access to Interstates 80 and 55, nearby state parks, a river made for paddling and a downtown full of murals and history, Streator today is a city that honors its hardscrabble roots while looking ahead. Its story, from trading post to coal camp to Glass Container Capital, is still being written by the people who call it home.

History of Streator