HR0217 99TH GENERAL ASSEMBLY

HR0217 LRB099 07721 MST 27854 r

HOUSE RESOLUTION

WHEREAS, The members of the General Assembly are proud to designate a section of Interstate 57 that encompasses an area where the first non-Native Americans in Illinois settled as the "French-Canadian Heritage Corridor"; the majority of settlers in the area were French-Canadian pioneers who immigrated in large numbers to what is now Kankakee and Iroquois Counties from the late 1820s to 1850s; those settlements included Bourbonnais Grove (now Bourbonnais), Le Petit Canada (gone now, but the site is located in the Davis Creek area of Kankakee River State Park), Rockville (gone now, but the site is located in the northwest section of Kankakee River State Park), St. George, L'Erable, Papineau, and St. Anne; after the Potawatomi, the first significant ethnic group to make contributions in the Kankakee area were the French-Canadians; and

WHEREAS, The French were no strangers to the heartland of North America; as early as 1543, France established the colony of New France, which eventually covered about half of the North American interior; the nineteenth-century French-Canadians were very familiar with the land south of the Great Lakes; they knew about Rene-Robert Cavelier Sieur de la Salle's (1643-87) quest to explore the rivers of New France that flowed into the Mississippi; he and 33 men made a portage from the St. Joseph River to a marshy river's headwaters; in 1679, the party continued paddling into the "Great West" along a new "connecting river" with 8 canoes; the party eventually completed the journey from Montreal to the mouth of the Mississippi; La Salle named the "connecting river" between the St. Joseph and Illinois Rivers, the Seignelay, in honor of colonial minister of France; the name was later changed to the Theakiki and is now called the Kankakee; the native Potawatomi called the land adjacent to the river "Te-yar-ac-ke" ("wonderful land"); the word "Ky-an-ke-ke" evolved; some Indian tribes called the land "Te-ok-e-kee" ("wolf") while some coureurs de bois (French "runners of the wood") used the name "Quin-que-que"; and

WHEREAS, The Kankakee River Valley of the Illinois Country was sparsely settled until Noel Levasseur (1799-1879) began recruiting settlers from his native Quebec Province, Canada; hundreds of French-Canadians soon came to settle and farm along the fertile Kankakee River in an area they called Bourbonnais Grove-extending from today's Kankakee River State Park to Cobb Park in Kankakee - an area 12 miles long by 1 mile wide; at the age of 19 in 1817, Levasseur was employed by the American Fur Company (headquartered in Astor, New York with a recruiting station in Montreal) along with his friends Dominique Bray, Henri Boucher, and 15-year-old Gurdon Hubbard (1802-86); after the Black Hawk War of 1832, Levasseur and Hubbard purchased land from the Potawatomi and opened the Chicago to Danville Road through the Grand Prairie along the Kankakee River (now Route 102), and the Hubbard Trail which Illinois highway 1 now follows; in the late 1820s and early 1830s, 2 other notable French-Canadians joined Noel Levasseur in the settlement along the Kankakee: the brothers Francois Bourbonnais, Sr. and Antoine Bourbonnais "Bourbonnais Grove" was named after them; and

WHEREAS, By 1846, there were at least 22 French-Canadian families living in Bourbonnais Grove; the records of St. Leo's Parish in Bourbonnais Grove (later to become Maternity of the Blessed Virgin Mary Church in Bourbonnais) in 1847 noted 77 French-Canadian families or 471 people; when Canadian-born George Letourneau (1831-1906) - destined to become a renowned statesman - arrived in Bourbonnais Grove in 1848, he attended church at St. Leo's Chapel, a wooden structure which had been built in 1841; a new church (Maternity of the Blessed Virgin Mary) replaced the chapel in 1849; this was the church in which Letourneau was married to Elodie (Langlois) Letourneau in 1852; it burned to the ground in 1853; work began 2 years later on a new church to be constructed of local limestone; construction was completed in 1858; over 150 years later, Maternity of the Blessed Virgin Mary Church appears much the same as it was back then; and

WHEREAS, George Letourneau became mayor of Bourbonnais in 1875 and mayor of Kankakee in 1892; he was present at the first Illinois State Republican Convention in Bloomington in 1856, and listened to Abraham Lincoln's "Lost Speech" - this reference denotes the few notes taken by the audience which was spellbound as Lincoln delivered an impassioned condemnation of slavery; the address was the precedent for his famous "House Divided" speech delivered in Springfield on June 16, 1858; Letourneau served in just about every Kankakee County political office, and was elected State Senator in the Illinois 38th and 39th General Assemblies from 1892 to 1996; and

WHEREAS, French-Canadian priests and brothers of the Viatorian Order and French-Canadian nuns of the Congregation of Notre Dame were instrumental in the religious and educational development of the Bourbonnais Grove community; in the later part of the nineteenth-century, girls attended the new Notre Dame Convent and School after it was built in 1862; boys were instructed by the Viatorian priests and brothers in the Bourbonnais Grove public school and then St. Viator Academy after 1868; young men could attend St. Viator College when the Viatorians were granted a university charter in 1874; when Letourneau became mayor of the Village of Bourbonnais, when it was incorporated in 1875, the community was already a thriving educational center; a new boy's school, another St. Viator Academy, was built in 1891; and

WHEREAS, The French-Canadians Noel Levasseur, George Letourneau, and Captain Francis Seguin spearheaded the organization of Kankakee County in 1853; the new county had a population of 8,000 people; the population would soon shift from Bourbonnais to Kankakee with the arrival of the railroad in 1853; Kankakee was originally platted as the "town of Bourbonnais" in 1853; 2 years later, the name was changed; the population of Bourbonnais Township in 1850 was 1,720 with 81% or 201 out of 248 families of French-Canadian descent; other French-Canadian settlements in Kankakee and Iroquois Counties were St. George (1848), L'Erable (1854), St. Anne (1851), and Papineau (1872); and

WHEREAS, At about the same time as the formation of Kankakee County in 1853, Canadian-born Father Charles Chiniquy (1809-99) was pastor of Maternity Blessed Virgin Mary Church in Bourbonnais Grove; after disagreeing with the Bishop of Chicago over the bishop's treatment of Catholics in Chicago, particularly French-Canadians, Fr. Chiniquy led an exodus of Bourbonnais Grove French-Canadian Roman Catholics to the village of St. Anne; this crisis split many French-Canadian families; older French-Canadians in the Kankakee area still today resent Fr. Chiniquy's schism; Fr. Chiniquy was excommunicated in 1856; he then left the Roman Catholic Church and formed the Christian Catholic Church of St. Anne; and

WHEREAS, Up until the 1950s, French was a primary spoken language in Bourbonnais; French-Canadian family names still abound in the telephone book, and the fleur-de-lis is the symbol of Bourbonnais - as the village symbol and all street signs testify; therefore, be it

RESOLVED, BY THE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES OF THE NINETY-NINTH GENERAL ASSEMBLY OF THE STATE OF ILLINOIS, that we designate a section of Interstate 57 as the "French-Canadian Heritage Corridor" with one sign located on 1-57 for southbound traffic just north of the Manteno exit 322 and another sign located on 1-57 for northbound traffic just south of Ashkum exit 293; and be it further

RESOLVED, That the Illinois Department of Transportation is requested to erect 2 signs on a section of Interstate 57, consistent with State and federal regulations, giving notice of the name, "French-Canadian Heritage Corridor", with one sign located on I-57 for southbound traffic just north of the Manteno exit 322 and another sign located on I-57 for northbound traffic just south of Ashkum exit 293 by July 15, 2015.