Beginning in 1832, settlers arrived as the Black Hawk War ended, and over the next decades the community developed from early land sales, the Chamblee Post Office, the Monroe Congregational Church, Maine Township government, and the Penny and Meacham Brick Yard into Pennyville, then Brickton, and finally the incorporated Village of Park Ridge in 1873. Railroad service began in 1856, a cemetery was chartered in 1858, twelve local soldiers died in the U.S. Civil War, and the area added its first permanent school in 1870. Park Ridge continued to grow through schools, public safety, electricity, a village hall, and cultural institutions, while also becoming home to figures and enterprises such as composer John Alden Carpenter, Captain William P. Black, Frederic W. Goudy, Clara Barck Welles, and an artists’ colony. In the twentieth century it incorporated as a city in 1910, opened its public library and park district, saw Mother Francis X. Cabrini purchase a farm during World War I, gained landmarks and institutions including the Pickwick Theatre, Tri-M Music Honor Society, Douglas Aircraft’s C-54 Skymaster production at Orchard Place, Lutheran General Hospital, and the Northwest Expressway, and is also noted as the hometown of Hillary Rodham Clinton.