the United States. All of the children, except for one, were living in Council Bluffs with no intention of moving back. They reasoned that they were living too far away to protect the land from illegal timber poaching. President James K. Polk approved the sale of the land, and in 1845 the entire reservation was collectively sold by the Ouilmette children, save for one sliver that Joseph Ouilmette sold individually at a later date. Early settlement after the Ouilmettes A number of early settlers worked small farms in the area, many of them near the lakeshore. Mary Dennis, Max Dusham, Charles Beaubien, Simon Doyle, Wendal Alles, Joel Stebbins, and Arunah Hill were among the most prominent members of this thinly settled community, and some of their descendants remained in the area for generations. In the 1850s and 1860s, more prosperous entrepreneurs from New York State and the Eastern seaboard bought out many of these settlers. Among them were Alexander McDaniel (who had arrived in the 1830s, then returned from the California gold rush with money to invest), John G. Westerfield, Henry Dingee, and John Gage. During this period, Illinois more generally was experiencing a high degree of land speculation and settlement. The Chicago and Milwaukee Railroad tracks were built in 1855, facilitating the settlement of what would become the North Shore. Several large owners of land within the former reservation saw the opportunity to develop a community, and offered to build a station at their own expense if the railway would agree to stop in Wilmette The offer was accepted, and in 1869, the Chicago and Milwaukee Railway (later the Chicago and North Western) began service to the station. The first station burned, but the second one had been finished by 1874 and is still in existence today. This was a predecessor of today's Wilmette station. In 1871 Central School, the community's first public school, was established in a one-room schoolhouse. The community was officially incorporated on September 19, 1872, as the Village of Wilmette, at Andrew Sherman's house on Greenleaf Avenue. John Westerfield, whose large farm on the lakeshore occupied the area where the original Ouilmette cabin had been, was elected as the new village's first president. In 1875 Wilmette's Protestant denominations partnered to construct the Union Evangelical Church at the northeast corner of Wilmette and Lake Avenues, an arrangement that would ultimately fail, as the groups came to