Early Milwaukee Avenue in northern Lake County: From stagecoach inns to dairy farms

SherylDeVore/Triblocal.comReporter

Northern Lake County’s first major highway was not a road, but a river.

The French explorers and missionaries traveled the Des Plaines River via canoe, in the mid 1600s and early 1700s just east of the present-day Milwaukee Avenue on their journeys north and south.
 

“It was navigable for canoes during the great part of the year,” wrote Edward S. Lawson in “A History of Warren Township.” In addition to the water route, trails created by Native Americans traversed the river valley.
 

It was from one of those main trails that Milwaukee Avenue arose in northern LakeCounty. Its path is not much different today than when the Native Americans traveled it.


Milwaukee Avenue was the road upon which many European ancestors jostled in stagecoaches from Chicago north looking for a new life in northern Illinois and Wisconsin. It was one of the roads upon which slaves who escaped from the south traveled on dark nights, looking for a safe haven. And it was the highway of prosperity in Warren Township.
 

Workers began to lay out the Warren Township portion of Milwaukee Road, in Gurnee, in December 1835, after the state authorized its construction.
 

“This road, though it was nothing more than a dirt road at its best was such an improvement over anything heretofore existing, that it was assumed, as a matter of course, it would never be superseded,” Lawson wrote. “I can remember seeing an empty wagon with four horses stuck fast in the mud between Gurnee station and Spalding Corners,” he wrote. “And as for hauling a load, it just wasn’t done.”
 

But it was the only real road travelers had as they boarded stagecoaches from Chicago to take them to a place where they could get squatter’s rights on uninhabited land and create businesses.
 

“The stagecoach ran once a week in the earlier days,” Tom Menson president of the Warren Township Historical Society, said. “Gurnee was halfway between Chicago and Milwaukee. It would take several days to get from Chicago to Gurnee, so the travelers needed lots of stage coach stops.
 

“People who stayed at the inns were mostly immigrants from England, Ireland and other parts of Europe,” Menson said.
 

Heading into Gurnee from the south, they would cross a floating log bridge over the

Des Plaines River to make their way to one of the many tarverns and inns along Milwaukee Avenue.
 

One of the owners of an inn on Milwaukee Avenue, which is now the Mother Rudd House and home of the Warren Township Historical Society, was Eratus Rudd, who married a wealthy woman named. Buell Harvey.
 

“Mr. Rudd was part of the abolitionist movement, so it’s assumed that the inn was used as a stopover for the underground railroad,” Menson said. “There was [and still is] a cellar and a barn. Either could have been used [to hide slaves].”
 

“Mr. Rudd was a big supporter of President Abraham Lincoln and Lincoln appointed him as postmaster,” Menson added. The post office was on Milwaukee Avenue as well.
 

The stagecoach days came to a halt when the railroad came through in 1874. The inns and taverns disappeared one by one, but the Mother Rudd Tavern, as it was called, was passed down to various owners, some who farmed there, others who used it as a summer home, others who rented it out, until the Village of Gurnee purchased it and the historical society renovated it in the late 1990s.
 

After the stagecoach era came the farming era. Dairy farmers raised their cows and milked them on farms along Milwaukee Avenue in Libertyville and Warren Township.
Folks who lived on small lots in Libertyville and Waukegan got their milk delivered from places such as Spinney Run Dairy Farm, which today is the site of Heather Ridge, a subdivision of townhomes, condominiums and single family homes on Milwaukee Avenue.
 

First horse and buggy and then trucks went down the main thoroughfare, delivering glass bottles of milk to residents.
 

“Dairy farming was labor intensive,” Diana Dretske, collections coordinator for the Lake County Museum, said. So farmers began to sell their land to spend more time with their children and community, she said. Today, only three dairy farms remain in Lake County. At one time at least 300 thrived in the county.
 

Milwaukee Avenue today consists of forest preserves next to the Des Plaines River and housing and shopping developments on higher ground. An entrance to the huge amusement park Great America is also off Milwaukee Avenue. A single old dairy barn sits on Milwaukee Avenue, as a sentinel to the past. And the Mother Rudd Home, now on Kilbourne Road after Milwaukee Avenue was rerouted, still stands as a reminder of the history of an old Indian trail in northern Lake County.

Story and photos by Triblocal.com reporter Sheryl DeVore

Wheeling Historical Society and Museum