Origin of The Name
Blue Island is so named because it is situated on the south end of a glacial moraine that was once an island when Lake Chicago covered the surrounding area thousands of years ago at the end of the last ice age. Early pioneers gave the ridge the name because at a distance it looked like an island set in a trackless prairie sea. The blue color was attributed to atmospheric scattering or to blue flowers growing on the ridge. From the Chicago Democrat, February, 1834:
"Nearly south of this town and twelve miles distant is Blue Island. This name is particularly appropriate. It is a table of land about six miles long and an average of two miles wide, of an oval form and rising some forty feet out of an immense plain which surrounds it on every side. The sides and slopes of this table, as well as the table itself, are covered with a handsome growth of timber, forming a belt surrounding about four or five thousand acres of beautiful table land. In summer, the plain is covered with luxurious herbage. It is uninhabited, and when we visited it, from its stillness, loneliness, and quiet, we pronounced it a vast vegetable solitude. The ridge, when viewed from a distance, appears standing in an azure mist of vapor, hence the appellation 'Blue Island'."
Read more about this topic: Blue Island, Illinois
Famous quotes containing the words origin of the, the name, origin of and/or origin:
“In the woods in a winter afternoon one will see as readily the origin of the stained glass window, with which Gothic cathedrals are adorned, in the colors of the western sky seen through the bare and crossing branches of the forest.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“The two great things yet to be discovered are these—The Art of rejuvenating old age in men, & oldageifying youth in books.—Who in the name of the trunk-makers would think of reading Old Burton were his book published for the first to day.”
—Herman Melville (1819–1891)
“The origin of storms is not in clouds,
our lightning strikes when the earth rises,
spillways free authentic power:
dead John Brown’s body walking from a tunnel
to break the armored and concluded mind.”
—Muriel Rukeyser (1913–1980)
“Art is good when it springs from necessity. This kind of origin is the guarantee of its value; there is no other.”
—Neal Cassady (1926–1968)