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HISTORY OF KANE COUNTY.
Detro, Mark Ranstead, James Mitchell, Solomon Ellis, Jr., A. W. Hodge, John S. Lee, Nathaniel Ladd, James Morey, William S. Peck, Benjamin Hall, William D. Peck, James Brown, Baldwin Wright, Josiah Mitchell, Alson Banker, Thomas Clark, Solomon Wright, Benjamin Puller, Benjamin F. Gage, Harvey Gage, Marley Gage, William Sanders and Lorenzo Mitchell. This was so soon after the "land sale" that these can well be named as old settlers. As the voting precincts were arranged in 1836, the lands of this township lay in Pleasant Grove, Lake and Sandusky Precincts. It became a part of Fairfleld in 1840 and of Washington in 1843. Later it was called Homer, and, at the final adjustment of Congressional townships, it became Plato. The name seems pleasant to the people, for every hamlet of the township ever has been and is "Plato" something-thus Plato Center, North Plato, Plato Corners and East Plato. It is a fine prosperous dairy township. The Chicago, Milwaukee & St. Paul Railroad cuts across the northeast corner, and McQueen Station, with its tile factory, is just within its limits. Pingree Grove, with its brick and tile yards, is just over the border in Rutland Township, and East Plato and Plato Center are thriving stations on the Chicago Great Western Railroad, which follows the general line of the old army trail diagonally across the township. Its first school was taught by Charlotte Griggs in 1840, at Plato Corners, down on the old stage road on Section 35. The first church organization was the Methodist, and they were holding services in the combined school house and town hall at Plato Center as early as 1848.
RUTLAND TOWNSHIP.
Rutland, embracing Town 42, Range 1, is of course, the central one of the north tier of townships of the county. It is very difficult to obtain authentic information regarding the detail of the original government surveys of the lands in Kane County; but it appears quite certain, that the south line of the north tier of townships was not established, technically, as a correctional line to bring the variant lines back to their true positions and courses, but rather that, while surveys were in progress northward from the foundation Base Line, nearly 250 miles south of here, a new sub-base line was carefully laid from the meridian line eastward; and from this as a base, township lines were surveyed to the north. It is certain that the land in these three townships, as well as in Mc-Henry County, was surveyed before the balance of Kane County. The sections in these townships, thus being laid off at the opening of new surveys, should be even without fractions; while we know that, as the surveys from the far south reached this new line, they had so converged toward the meridian line as to be over a mile out of their true course to the north, causing the "jog" eastward, and the range lines had taken so wide a northward trend that they left heavy fractions in the last tier of sections south of this sub-base line.
The surface of this township was far more broken into knolls and short ranges of hills- some of them quite high, and with deep sloughs and water-holes between-than any other portion of the county, which greatly retarded its early occupation. Nearly all the dry land was covered with oak openings, but there was no real timber land in the township. A few choice spots were taken at an early day; yet there was land subject to entry in this township more than ten years after the early date at which it was placed on public sale. Its lands came into market with those of Hampshire, September 2, 1839. The meandering brooks that drain it can scarcely be traced to any distinctive head; but the branches of those which flow to the Kishwaukee in a northwesterly course, can be followed, respectively, to what was a large pond on the southeast quarter of Section 30, near Sunset Station, and the other to what were sloughs near the center of Section 21, while there was another brook flowing in the same direction from near the center of Section 11. The one arm of Tyler Creek reached to the sloughs in the neighborhood of Pingree Grove, and the other to those about Gilbert Station. There was quite a pretty prairie lake near the center of the line between Sections 1 and 2, and another, called Lake Killarney, amid the hills on the east half of Section 15.
About the winter of 1852 the contractors, grading the road-bed of the old Galena & Chicago Union Railroad, made a fill of six or eight feet across a frozen slough, a mile or so northwest of Gilbert's. When the frost came out of the ground the next spring, the embankment sank through the vegetable mold, or crust,
Dundee Area History
