Historians still do not agree on how this place got its name, and at least eight spellings are on record.
Bachelor's Grove sits in Bremen Township, Cook County, Illinois, in the southwest suburbs of Chicago, just northwest of Midlothian and Oak Forest. It is a roughly trapezoidal patch enclosed by the Rubio Woods forest preserve, one side bordered by the remains of the Midlothian Turnpike, an early toll road running from Blue Island to points southwest.
English homesteaders relocating from New England settled the surrounding land, Stephen Rexford arguably the best known of that first wave, around 1833. Legal records show that Edward M. Everden sold the property to Frederick Schmidt in 1864, reserving and setting aside one acre of the land for use as a graveyard.
The name is genuinely unresolved. A family called Batchelder are known to have been living in the area by 1845, which is one possibility. Rexford claimed that he and three other single men settled the area, which is the other. Recorded variations include Bachelor, Batchelder, Bachelder, Berzel, Petzel, Bachlor, Bachellor and Batchel, and the cemetery has also been called Everden, or Everdon.
The Bachelors Grove Cemetery and Settlement Research Center publishes a history written by Brad L. Bettenhausen, president of the Tinley Park Historical Society, which puts the settlement earlier still: beginning as early as the late 1820s, with larger numbers of immigrants arriving through the 1830s and 1840s. The first settlers were generally American Yankees of English, Irish and Scottish descent, most of them out of New York, Vermont and Connecticut. A second wave from Europe, primarily Germanic, began in the late 1840s and became the predominant group for better than the next fifty years.
The cemetery is best known as the setting for a large body of ghostlore. The documented history underneath it is quieter: a settlement, an acre set aside, and an argument about a name that has now run for two centuries.
Other places on the map within a couple of hours.
