24/7 Trauma and Biohazard Cleanup in Highwood, IL

Highwood is a small North Shore city in Moraine Township, Lake County, Illinois, about 28 miles north of downtown Chicago.

The entire city covers only 0.72 square miles, yet it held 5,074 residents at the 2020 census - a density of more than 7,000 people per square mile.

The 2020 census counted 1,867 households in Highwood.

The land was Potawatomi territory until the 1833 Treaty of Chicago, and the first non-Native settler arrived in 1846.

Thomas Curley suggested the name "High Woods" because the settlement stood on the highest wooded ground between Chicago and Milwaukee, on a ridge about 100 feet above Lake Michigan.

After the 1886 Haymarket Riot, Chicago businessmen bought land here for an army post called Camp Highwood, which was officially named Fort Sheridan on February 27, 1888, in honor of General Philip Sheridan.

In 1888 the town's trustees renamed the community the Village of Fort Sheridan to borrow the fort's glamour, but postal mix-ups forced the name back to Highwood in 1894.

The saloons that catered to off-duty soldiers led President Theodore Roosevelt to call Highwood "one of the toughest towns in America," and federal authorities banned liquor sales within about a mile of the fort under the so-called Highwood Quadrangle.

In the 1920s many northern Italian immigrants from Modena settled in Highwood, a large number of them arriving from the Bureau County coal town of Dalzell.

Today Highwood has reinvented itself as a North Shore dining and nightlife destination, and the city chamber runs a festival series called Celebrate Highwood.