Bloomingdale began as a farming settlement in March 1833, when the brothers Silas, Lyman, and Harvey Meacham arrived on land then owned by Erasmus O. Hills and settled just south of two small groves known as Meacham's and Sarah's groves. Bloomingdale Village was officially platted and recorded on January 11, 1845. Tompkins Park stands on what had been Hills farmland owned by the first settlers, the Meacham family. Most local farms were dairy farms, and dairy farmers regularly lined up each morning at the railroad stop at Gary and Army Trail roads with cans of milk on their wagons for shipment and sale. In its early years Bloomingdale was mostly farmland, with cows and corn common along west Schick and Army Trail roads, then slowly and steadily changed from a rural area into a more urban one. The population was 339 in 1950, then rose from 1,262 in 1960 to 2,974 in 1970 and to 12,659 between 1970 and 1980. The 1960s marked the beginning of this transformation through land annexations and farmland sales, and ground was broken for the Westlake subdivision, where Tompkins Park is located, in 1969. The park was first leased from the school district from 1973 to 1991, when the Village of Bloomingdale bought it and deeded it to the Park District. One of the last active farmers in the area was Herb Frick, whose farm continued into the 1970s. After about a century as largely "Smalltown USA," Bloomingdale experienced major growth in population, business, and prosperity from the mid-1970s through the 1980s, and by 1981 almost no farmland within Bloomingdale was still being actively farmed. Tompkins Park is named for Harold Tompkins, former Superintendent of School District #13.