Emergency Biohazard Cleanup Services in Ford Heights, IL

Ford Heights is a village in Cook County in Chicago's far south suburbs, known until 1987 as East Chicago Heights.

The area was first settled in the late 1840s and served as a stopping point on the Underground Railroad for enslaved people fleeing to freedom.

By the early 20th century Ford Heights was an agricultural community of farms run mostly by Polish, Lithuanian and Italian families, and after World War I African American migrants from the South arrived to work the farms.

East Chicago Heights incorporated as a village in 1949 with Charlie Williams as its first mayor, and the 1950 census counted 1,548 residents, 76.9% of them Black — the village has remained predominantly Black ever since.

The Ford Motor Company opened a stamping plant next to the village in 1956 and offered Black workers an equal shot at well-paying jobs, helping East Chicago Heights grow into a blue-collar, middle-class community whose population more than doubled to 3,270 by 1960.

The Sunnyfield subdivision, which opened in 1964, became one of the most popular neighborhoods in the village during its growth years.

In 1987 the village renamed itself Ford Heights in an attempt to annex the Ford stamping plant site, but the move failed and the land was eventually annexed by neighboring Chicago Heights instead.

Ford Heights peaked at 5,347 residents in 1980, then declined by more than 66% to 1,813 people in the 2020 census, living in 885 households across the village's 1.95 square miles.

The village's main east-west road became part of U.S. Route 30, the transcontinental Lincoln Highway, in the 1920s.

Ford Heights students attend the Medgar Evers Primary Academic Center and Cottage Grove Upper Grade Center in local District 169, then Bloom Trail High School in Bloom Township High School District 206.