Evanston Township was a civil township in Cook County, Illinois, United States from 1857 until 2014, when it was dissolved. At the time it was dissolved, its boundaries were coterminous with the city of Evanston, and the population at the 2010 census was 74,486. The township history includes that of two townships that were both originally named Ridgeville Township and came to be renamed Evanston Township. History Loyola professor Patricia Melvin-Mooney states that a small community of German and Luxembourger farmers settled near the present-day intersection of Ridge and Devon Avenue in the 1830s, and the community became known as Ridgeville. Frances Willard in her 1891 history of Evanston associated the name with a log cabin, built in approximately 1835, southwest of what became Evanston, by former Major Edward Henry Mulford, the first jeweler in the area. The community was within the large and undefined voting district, north of the then-existing Chicago city limits, known as Gross Point. Ridgeville Township came into existence in April 1850, with its first elections held on April 2, 1850. Some early records use the name Ridgevill for the township. On April 26, 1850, the name of the Gross Point post office was changed to Ridgeville. The mail was received at Mulford's cabin, which had expanded to become a tavern known as Ten-Mile House for its distance from Chicago on the Green Bay stage route. Ridgeville Township was organized as a civil township with the southern border in the Irving Park area and the northern border at what is now Central Street in Evanston, which at that time marked the southern boundary of land reserved to Archange Ouilmette. The western boundary was Western Avenue, and the eastern boundary was Lake Michigan. In an election held at the house of George Reeley, the citizens elected Edward Murphy as the first township supervisor, and Philip Rogers as assessor. Gross Point voting district ceased to exist. Later elected officials included Chicagoan Conrad Sulzer, the first known European settler in the Ravenswood area, as township collector, and John Anderson, of what would later be called Andersonville, as highway commissioner. As of the 1850 census the population was only 441. In the 1851 referendum on the Illinois banking law, only 19 voters came to the polls in Ridgeville Township. In 1853, the Board of Trustees of Northwestern University purchased in the northern part of the township and proceeded to plat