Growing up in an Illinois factory town that seemed to have as many corn silos as smokestacks, I often wondered why everything around me sounded so cosmopolitan and French. My grandfather, for example, worked more than half his life in a Chrysler Automotive Plant in Belvidere, a town named after a French term of Italian origins that described a decorative garden summerhouse. He’d tell me our town and other Illinois place names like DuPage, Bourbonnais, and DesPlaines conveyed just how prized the region was when Jacques Marquette and Louis Joliet first mapped the territory in 1673 while expanding the French empire. As a youth, I wondered if the whole thing was a colossal miscalculation, because there was nothing decorative about Belvidere. The 3 million-square-foot factory where my grandfather worked dominated the town, its parking lot filling the landscape not with greenery but with rows and rows of hauntingly uniform cars awaiting shipment. Do belvederes, as the term is more commonly spelled, even have parking lots?
Though odd to me as a child, I have come to appreciate Illinois’s curiously French origins. They seem to embody something essential about the state. As my amateur historian grandfather taught me, Marquette and Joliet initially sought out the territory of the Illini Indians for ostensibly different purposes. Marquette, a Jesuit, hoped to find new communities of Native Americans to Christianize. Joliet, a merchant, wanted to map new routes for trade. But as the state’s history makes clear, their endeavors were actually quite complementary. Over the next century, missionaries followed Joliet’s maps into the territory Europeans now phonetically spelled Ee-lee-nwah, while trappers utilized the missions Jesuits founded as outposts on the fur trade.
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