Naperville

Naperville is a city on the DuPage River west of Chicago, Illinois, spreading across DuPage and Will counties. Its Moser Tower, at the foot of Rotary Hill, holds the Millennium Carillon, a set of 72 bronze bells.

Joseph Naper arrived on the west bank of the river with his family and friends in 1831 and founded Naper's Settlement there. It was incorporated as the Village of Naperville in 1857, and it kept the seat of DuPage County until Wheaton took that role in the late 1860s. Peter Edward Kroehler opened a furniture factory beside the Chicago, Burlington and Quincy tracks in the late 1880s, and the village was reincorporated as a city a few years later. Farms surrounded it until the 1960s, when the research laboratories of Bell Labs and Amoco along the Illinois Technology and Research Corridor started decades of rapid growth.

Mondelez International bakes the Triscuit crackers sold across North America at its Naperville plant. Dukane Precast, based in the city, casts double-wall precast concrete panels for buildings, and Nalco Water, part of Ecolab, develops water treatment chemicals at its Naperville campus.

The Naperville Riverwalk, begun in the early 1980s to mark a century and a half since Naper's arrival, follows the West Branch of the DuPage River through downtown with brick paths, covered bridges and a fountain. Naper Settlement is an outdoor history museum where houses, a church and shops of the 19th century were moved onto one site near the old center. Centennial Beach, a swimming area in a former stone quarry, takes its name from the centennial of the town. North Central College, founded by a forerunner of the United Methodist Church in the 1860s, has its campus in the historic district east of downtown, among the hundreds of old buildings listed on the National Register of Historic Places.