Using over two hundred historical photographs, Wayne Township offers a unique view of a town that has undergone great change in its lifetime. Wayne was traversed by Native Americans for thousands of years before Dutch businessmen and farmers settled there c. 1695. This book illustrates how Wayne's twenty-first-century landscape of busy retail centers, transportation highways, and residential neighborhoods was once a fertile, cultivated valley. The images in this book reveal Wayne's economic and cultural past, including the farmsteads, barns, gristmills, sawmills, blacksmith shops, and churches that made up the Wayne Township region years ago. Wayne Township provides clues to a past rich in history in the images of more than thirty existing historic structures and lost architectural treasures, and reveals legends, folk tales, ghost stories, and historical fact. The book tells many stories, including those of Arent Schuyler's exploration of the valley and George Washington's formulation of war-winning strategies at the Dey Mansion. It explores early industry in Wayne-the iron furnace at Pompton Falls, the brick manufacturing and powder works in Mountain View, and the arrival of the railroad in the area. Pictured are famous twentieth-century residents Albert Payson Terhune and his collies, Cecil B. DeMille, LeGrand Parish, and the horse Preakness.

The contemporary method of township government arrived in Illinois in the middle of the nineteenth century. Replacing the commission method of county government, which Illinois had employed since statehood in 1818, the township innovation spread south and westward across Illinois, almost completely ousting the county commissioners. Today, the commission format survives only in seventeen peripheral and largely rural Illinois counties. This book asserts that townships have persisted partly because they offer vital services at a reasonable cost to taxpayers, but also because of a vigorous defense of the method made by township officials with political connections in the Illinois general assembly. Discussing the successes and failures of attempts by abolition-minded citizens to eliminate all or individual townships in various counties, Township focuses on the spatial diffusion, periodic threats to, and determined persistence of the township system.