p125  Part III, Northern Illinois

With the opening of the Erie Canal in 1825 and the building of the first railroad out of Chicago in 1848, a greater flood than ever of homeseekers from the East came to Illinois, taking up land especially in the northern part of the state. Chicago became the gateway to a fertile, rolling prairie country. Before long, railroad trains were bringing the sons and daughters of foreign lands, sturdy people seeking homes in the New World. They, like the Easterners who preceded them, laid out farms or helped to make villages into towns, towns into cities. And a descendant of Welsh pioneers, Frank Lloyd Wright, settled in the metropolis at the foot of Lake Michigan and gave the world an architecture that is as expressive of the twentieth century as Gothic was of the twelfth.

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