Essay: Lines on Paper, Land as Commodity

In 1830, Chicago was a speck of a settlement, with fewer than one hundred people at the edge of what was still a frontier wilderness. But that was about to change.

On August 4, James Thompson, a South Carolina–born surveyor from Randolph County at the far southwest edge of Illinois, completed his Map of the Town of Chicago, a survey of an area of 0.375 square miles, which he divided into a grid of streets and alleys. Bounded by Kinzie, Madison, State, and Desplaines Streets, the area covered the south and north banks of the main channel of the Chicago River, as well as the east and west banks of the river’s north and south branches. Randolph named the interior streets but not State, the eastern boundary, nor Madison, the southern boundary. He carried out the job for the Illinois & Michigan (I&M) Canal commissioners, who wanted the land surveyed so it could be sold to finance the construction of the canal.

In other words, in drawing his lines on paper, Thompson was changing the land into a commodity, something that could be bought and sold—and also something that was not open, free and clear, as the Native Americans had experienced it for centuries. This was important not only for this small place at the southern tip of Lake Michigan but also for the rest of the nation and the world, as would become clear forty-one years later when a fire destroyed much of the Chicago that had grown from Thompson’s map.

As John William Nelson notes in his insightful Muddy Ground: Native Peoples, Chicago’s Portage, and the Transformation of a Continent, the American triumph over the Indigenous peoples of the Midwest was not only military in nature, nor did it happen just because of the waves upon waves of settlers and speculators who eventually arrived. It was, most of all, because of the reshaping of the idea of the land itself. Native Americans had freely used the land for hunting, fishing, and farming in their nomadic movements, but now it was closed off to them, now it was “owned” by someone.1 Thompson’s map was a prime example of this new idea of land ownership.

Selling the land as a commodity was important because money was needed for the I&M Canal, and the idea of the canal was why Americans wanted to be at the speck called Chicago in the first place.

In the late 1600s, Louis Jolliet suggested that a canal could be built through a Chicago-area portage to link Lake Michigan and the Mississippi River.2 Later, government officials focused their hopes on a human-made waterway from the Chicago River through the place called Mud Lake (a Native American and fur trading portage) to the Des Plaines River and then through other waterways to the Mississippi River. With a canal, the Atlantic Ocean, the East Coast, and the Great Lakes would be linked to the central portion of the continent all the way south to New Orleans and the Gulf of Mexico.

Land that could be sold to pay for the canal was important because it was a magnet for speculators who came to the town to buy and sell the land with the idea of making big money. And not only that. It also established a location that Americans, using financing from the East, could develop into a place to make more money through business, trading, construction, lumbering, shipping and so on now and, with the canal eventually linking up, even more in the future.

The development of the site of Chicago and the promise of a future canal made the city the focus of railroads which started bringing goods from the hinterland for shipping on Lake Michigan and on Eastern railroads. In fact, when the canal finally opened in 1848, it was soon superseded by the rail network already in place.

All of these factors were important for setting the stage for Chicago’s phenomenal growth as a city through the mid-1800s when its population routinely grew by leaps and bounds.

Indeed, Chicago became so important to the nation and the world that, in 1871, when its central business district and much of the area near the lake were destroyed by the Great Chicago Fire, East Coast banks and entrepreneurs quickly flooded the city with money to rebuild. They had huge investments in the city in terms of property, businesses, and transportation. As economic historian Louis P. Cain notes, “By 1871 Chicago had come to occupy such an important place in the national economy that the net benefits of rebuilding after the fire far exceeded those of leaving the site an ash heap.”3

All because James Thompson drew lines on a piece of paper.

Notes
1. John William Nelson, Muddy Ground: Native Peoples, Chicago’s Portage and the Transformation of a Continent (University of North Carolina Press, 2023), 143–44.
2. Louis P. Cain, Chicago Before the Fire: An Economic History (University of Illinois Press, 2025), 3, 12–14.
3. Louis P. Cain, Chicago Before the Fire, 2.

 

Patrick T. Reardon

3.20.26

This essay was originally published in the Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society • 119 :1 (Spring 2026).