Every Farm, Every Family:
The Landowners Who Built Orland Park 1834–1970

The first wave of settlers in Orland Township — arriving between 1834 and roughly 1848 — were predominantly of English-Yankee heritage: people whose families had been in America for several generations, who had migrated from New England or western New York along the Great Migration corridor, and who brought with them the institutional DNA of New England: Congregationalist or Methodist religion, the township meeting system of government, common schools, and a strong belief in community improvement.

Henry Taylor, William Bandle (despite his possible German surname), the Myrick brothers, Thomas Cooper, William Jackson, and Alanson St. Clair all fit this profile. These were the people who organized the first township government meeting at Centre School in 1850, established the Cooper Cemetery (the oldest burial ground in Orland Park), and set up the first post office. They were the institutional founders of the community even if subsequent waves of German immigrants would eventually outnumber them.

The John Humphrey family also belongs to this wave. The Humphreys were among the English-heritage families who established the northeastern section of the township, and their legacy survives in the John Humphrey Sports Complex, one of Orland Park's most important recreation facilities. The Humphrey family's land was in the section that developed earliest in the suburban era.

By 1870, the English-Yankee families were still present but increasingly intermarried with German-heritage neighbors. The cultural distinctiveness between “old Yankee” and “new German” families faded across three generations as the shared experience of farming the same land, attending the same schools, and fighting in the same wars created a unified Orland Township identity.

The 1848 European revolutions and subsequent political turmoil sent hundreds of thousands of German speakers to the United States. Many came through New York and headed directly to the cheap, fertile land of the Illinois prairie. By the 1860 census, German-born residents and their children constituted a large plurality — probably the outright majority — of Orland Township's farming population. The 1861–62 military census makes this unmistakable: surnames like Stellwagen, Junker, Sipple, Battenhouse, Arnold, Ludwig, Schilling, Ramer, Miller, Horn, Endress, Gouderman, and Grosscup fill page after page.

These were not a monolithic group. They came from different German states — Prussia, Baden, Württemberg, Bavaria, the Rhineland — and brought with them different religious traditions, different agricultural practices, and different political loyalties. But they shared a language, a work ethic shaped by Old World farming traditions, and an intense attachment to land ownership that had been denied to many of their families in hierarchical European societies. In America, and specifically in Orland Township, they could own their land outright. For a German peasant farmer who had spent his life as a tenant, this was transformational.

The Old German Methodist Cemetery in Orland Township is the most tangible evidence of the scale of German settlement. German Methodist congregations were a distinct denomination that combined German Lutheran religious culture with American Methodism's emphasis on personal conversion and congregational independence. A cemetery large enough to earn the name “German Methodist” implies a congregation large enough to sustain its own religious institution — which implies hundreds of German-heritage families in the immediate area.

The Stellwagen family exemplifies the trajectory of German-heritage farming families in Orland Township. Matthias Stellwagen appears in the 1861–62 census (recorded as “Stellwagen / Stillwagen”). The family farmed continuously through the 19th and 20th centuries, with Ralph Stellwagen marrying Mabel Cooper in 1916 and uniting two founding-era families. The Stellwagen Farm Heritage Site, preserved by the Village of Orland Park, stands today as the most complete surviving example of an Orland Township farm complex.

The Maue and Schiek families established the Maue School at 179th Street and 108th Avenue, one of the one-room schoolhouses that dotted the township and served as the basic educational institution for rural children. The Handorf family farmed the southwestern sections. The Ramer family (Conrad Ramer in the 1861–62 census) was one of several German families whose Germanic roots showed in their preference for large extended-family farm operations that kept multiple generations on the same land.

Among the most historically significant immigrants to Orland Township in the 1850s were Jacob and Bernard Hostert, brothers from the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg. The Hostertes arrived in the early 1850s and built the log cabin complex that today survives — relocated and preserved — near Humphrey Woods. These are among the oldest surviving structures associated with the Orland Park area, and they represent a fascinating micro-history of 19th-century construction technique, immigrant resourcefulness, and the physical demands of frontier farming.

Luxembourg was a small, predominantly Catholic, French- and German-speaking duchy that in the mid-19th century was experiencing significant out-migration due to land pressure and economic hardship. Luxembourger immigrants tended to travel in family and village groups, settling near one another in America and maintaining close community ties. The Hostert brothers following each other to Orland Township fits this pattern exactly: Jacob came first, evaluated the land and the community, and Bernard followed. Their cabins — built of native timber cut from the oak groves that once covered parts of the township — demonstrate the construction techniques of their era: hand-hewn logs, notched corners, minimal hardware. A skilled carpenter with a broadaxe, an adze, and a good eye could build a livable cabin in a matter of weeks.

The Hostert cabin complex is preserved near Humphrey Woods and is accessible as part of the Village of Orland Park's heritage site program. Contact Libby Paulson at 708.403.6268 or visit orlandpark.org/heritage for visiting information. For genealogical researchers with Hostert ancestry, the SSGHS holds records that can assist in tracing this family's landholdings and subsequent history in the township.

The mass immigration from southern and eastern Europe that transformed American cities between 1880 and 1920 sent relatively few families directly to rural townships like Orland. Urban industrial jobs in Chicago were the primary destination for Italian, Polish, Bohemian, and Slovak immigrants. But some of these families, particularly those with agricultural backgrounds, eventually made their way to the Chicago-area farmland — either directly or after a generation of urban life.

The Chiappetti family arrived in 1916 as part of the Italian immigrant wave. They established a farm operation in Orland Township that would, three decades later, become the subject of one of the most significant land transactions in the township's history. On June 2, 1948, the Chiappetti family sold approximately 400 acres to the Andrew Corporation for $42,000 — $105 per acre. In 2024 dollars, that total translates to approximately $530,000 for 400 acres, or about $1,325 per acre in today's money. The Chiappettis were selling at Depression-era prices into a postwar world that would within a decade transform that land into suburban gold.

The Stahulak family arrived around 1920 from the Austro-Hungarian Empire — the broad multi-ethnic empire that encompassed modern Austria, Hungary, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Croatia, Slovenia, and parts of Poland and Romania. The Stahulak surname suggests South Slavic (Croatian or Slovenian) heritage. Like the Italian families who preceded them, they came from agricultural traditions and found in Orland Township a landscape they could farm and a community that, while culturally different from what they had known, was organized around the same basic values of land ownership, family continuity, and civic participation.