Biohazard Cleanup Near Downtown Wayne Wayne, IL

Wayne is a village in the Fox River Valley that straddles the county line, with its eastern portion in DuPage County's Wayne Township and its western portion in Kane County's St. Charles Township.

The first permanent settlers arrived in the Wayne area in 1834, and the community was originally called Wayne Station after Revolutionary War general Anthony Wayne.

Wayne was not incorporated until 1958; before that, the community was run by a private Wayne Community Association, with voluntary contributions funding village services including police protection.

Wayne had a population of 2,286 at the 2020 census, and Census Bureau survey estimates count roughly 960 households in the village.

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Wayne was a prominent center of horse breeding and farming research, famous for its French Percheron draft horses.

Mark Dunham founded Oaklawn Farm in Wayne in 1866, one of the earliest Percheron breeding farms in the United States, and Dunham became known as the Father of the Percheron in North America.

Dunham Castle, the village's primary landmark, was built between 1878 and 1882 as a stone mansion with a turret inspired by a Norman castle.

During the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago, special trains carried visitors out to Wayne to see the Percheron horses on Dunham's roughly 2,000-acre farm.

The Dunham Woods Riding Club was founded in 1934 by Wayne and Geneva residents who leased the original Dunham family home, and it still anchors the village's equestrian culture.

More than 300 acres around Pratt's Wayne Woods were purchased in the 1990s to create what became James 'Pate' Philip State Park, DuPage County's only state park.