Bonfield, IL

Bonfield is a Kankakee County village about twelve miles west of Kankakee, built where the limestone, farm country, and a railroad once met. Thomas Verkler, a quarryman, helped establish the settlement, and the village was first laid out as Verkler in 1882. The Kankakee & Seneca Railroad arrived in 1881, and the town was renamed for Thomas Bonfield, the railroad attorney who helped locate its stations. The line disappeared long ago, but its old path on Johnson Street and the surviving quarry traces still give the village a strong industrial footnote.

Railroad years brought a depot, grain elevators, a stockyard, a creamery, stores, a lumberyard, a blacksmith, a restaurant, and a post office. Local building stone and ice also moved out by rail, and the depot was eventually moved about a mile and a half south and turned into a barn. Bonfield's high school burned in the early 1930s, after which students went to Herscher High School. Today the village sits inside the Kankakee-Bradley metropolitan area, but its scale remains rural: a small group of streets surrounded by fields, with the old quarry and rail story still lingering beneath the surface.