Ridgeville Township, Illinois was a civil township in Illinois, United States, comprising approximately what are now the Lakeview, Uptown, Edgewater, and Rogers Park neighborhoods of Chicago, and also part of what is now Evanston. It no longer exists.
History
Loyola professor Patricia Melvin-Mooney states that a small community of German and Luxembourger farmers settled near the present-day intersection of Ridge and Devon Avenue in the 1830s, and the community became known as Ridgeville. Frances Willard in her 1891 history of Evanston associated the name with a log cabin, built in approximately 1835, southwest of what became Evanston, by former Major Edward Henry Mulford, the first jeweler in the area. The community was within the large and undefined voting district, north of the then-existing Chicago city limits, known as Gross Point.
On April 26, 1850, the name of the Gross Point post office was changed to Ridgeville. The mail was received at Mulford's cabin, which had expanded to become a tavern known as Ten-Mile House for its distance from Chicago on the Green Bay stage route.
The same year, Ridgeville Township, an Illinois unit of local government, was organized, with the southern border at Irving Park Avenue bordering the current Graceland Cemetery, and the northern border at what is now Central Street in Evanston, which at that time marked the southern boundary of land reserved to Archange Ouilmette. The western boundary was Western Avenue, and the eastern boundary was Lake Michigan. In an election held at the house of George Reeley, the citizens elected Edward Murphy as the first township supervisor, and Philip Rogers as assessor. Gross Point voting district ceased to exist. Later elected officials included Chicagoan Conrad Sulzer, the first known European settler in the Ravenswood area, as township collector, and John Anderson, of what would later be called Andersonville, as highway commissioner.
As of the 1850 census the population was only 441. In the 1851 referendum on the Illinois banking law, only 19 voters came to the polls in Ridgeville Township.
In 1853, the Board of Trustees of Northwestern University purchased 380 acres (1.5 km2) in the northern part of the township and proceeded to plat around the university campus a village, which, in 1854, they named Evanston after one of their leaders. The founding of the university and the extension of a railroad line that served it spurred rapid development in the Evanston community. In 1855, the Post Office changed the name of the post office from Ridgeville to Evanston.
On February 17, 1857, the township was split; the northern portion added the Ouilmette Reservation and became Evanston Township, and the portion south of Devon Avenue became Lake View Township, and eventually part of Chicago.
Ridgeville Township ceased to exist after various annexations by the City of Evanston, concluding in 1916, but for a while the name Ridgeville was used for a street running along a north-south sand ridge in Rogers Park; the street was later renamed Paulina. A park district in the south part of Evanston retains the name Ridgeville.