Luther Bartlett's Rail Deal
Bartlett's original 40-acre town site belonged to Luther Bartlett, who had arrived in Illinois by way of Michigan in 1844 after growing up in Conway, Massachusetts. In 1873 he offered the Chicago & Pacific Railroad a right-of-way through that same 40 acres along with a station site, and the railroad and the Bartletts jointly platted and sold the depot lots that followed; the original 1873 depot still stands today as the Bartlett Depot Museum, and the Village of Bartlett incorporated in 1891.
Building Before the Automobile Era
A town platted around an 1873 rail depot and incorporated in 1891 was built well before poured-concrete foundations were standard practice, so Bartlett's oldest structures near the original depot lots are more likely to rest on fieldstone or brick pier foundations than on a modern slab. Those foundations sit in the same Kane County till as everywhere else in the area, where the clay component swells when wet and pulls back when dry, a slow-motion movement that predates the building by thousands of years but still acts on it today.