Cedarville, IL

Cedarville is a Stephenson County village and the birthplace of Jane Addams, the social reformer and 1931 Nobel Peace Prize winner. Addams was born there in 1860 in the family of John H. Addams, a farmer who also operated a gristmill and later built a bank in Freeport. The Addams Homestead remains the village's best-known historic connection. Cedarville's own name came after a string of earlier names, including Newport's Mill, Hanna's Store, The Burgh, and Milford; the village became Cedarville in 1834 because of the area's cedar trees.

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The railroad arrived in the nineteenth century, carrying livestock, passengers, paper, lumber, and lime, and helping Cedarville support an opera house completed in 1888. Cedarville College opened in 1887. The Cedarville Area Historical Society now uses the 1889 schoolhouse for exhibits about Addams and the village's earlier families. Students are part of Freeport School District 145, and Freeport remains the nearby regional center. Cedarville's streets hold two stories at once: a small Illinois railroad village and the early home of a woman whose work later reshaped social reform in Chicago and beyond.