Before farmland covered the region, the Grand Kankakee Marsh spread across nearly a million acres east of Momence into northern Indiana as one of North America’s largest wetlands, larger than the Florida Everglades and rich in wildlife, fur, fowl, and fish. Claimed by the French as part of New France, it later drew presidents, industrialists, and European nobility for hunting in the late 1800s. Kickapoo and Pottawatomie Indians lived there long before European settlers arrived. Momence took its name from Isadore Mo-mence “Moness,” son of Chief Pierre “Pierish” Moran, who married Ge-Neir, daughter of a Pottawatomie chief. After settlement in 1834, treaties with the Pottawatomie allowed the city to move one mile downstream to its present location. From 1852 to 1919, the marsh was drained with horse teams and later steam shovels to create farmland, leaving only a 72-acre remnant known as the Momence Wetlands six miles east. Much of Momence’s nineteenth-century downtown business district still stands and is listed on the National Register of Historic Places, with many buildings using enameled brick made by the Tiffany Brick Factory around 1884 until its closure during the Depression hurt the local economy. In 1835, the Illinois General Assembly established a state road linking old Fort Vincennes in Indiana with Fort Dearborn at Chicago along the Vincennes Trail, the first official route in Illinois and later Route 1; passing through Momence, it became Vincennes Road, and one of its milestones still survives east of town. In 1915, Carl G. Fisher of the Lincoln Highway Association helped form the Dixie Highway as a north-south chain of paved roads from Chicago to Miami to promote tourism, paving dirt roads with brick or concrete so motorists from the urban North could travel reliably to the rural South.