Germantown Hills, Illinois

History

Settlement of the area began as early as November 1831, when Methodist Rev. Zadock Hall began preaching in modern-day Worth Township. Soon after, an iron foundry was opened by settler Philip Klein. By 1837, a Catholic church was organized by German Catholics in the area. In 1850, William Hoshor built a tavern and hotel named the Germantown House, for which the village would be named more than 100 years later. A steam sawmill was built in 1860, and in the 1890s, the Union House was erected as a tavern, grocery store, and saloon.

The area remained almost completely agricultural until the incorporation of Oak Grove Park in 1954. The village's founders wished to use the name "Germantown" to reflect Hoshor's Germantown House and the area's large German-American representation. Still, the name was taken by a village in southern Illinois. Upon its incorporation, the population of Oak Grove Park was 182. In 1967, the name Oak Grove Park was dropped in favor of Germantown Hills. The village's population would rise steadily until the 1980 census, when the annexation of the Whispering Oaks subdivision brought the number to 524. Subsequent development and annexation brought the population to 1195 by 1990. Rampant development, fueled by suburbanization in the Peoria Metropolitan Area, brought the population to its most-recent count of 3,438.

From the History section of Germantown Hills, Illinois on Wikipedia, under CC BY-SA 4.0.