Homes for sale in
Carpentersville.

Carpentersville traces its origins to 1837, when Charles and Daniel Carpenter, traveling west toward the Rock River with their families, were forced by spring floods on the Fox River to camp on the east bank and ended up settling what they called Carpenter's Grove. Charles's son, Julius Angelo Carpenter, became the village's first prominent citizen, opening the first store at age 23, building the first Fox River bridge in the vicinity in 1851, and later running the local foundry. In 1868 he took control of Illinois Iron and Bolt, and in 1873 he founded Star Manufacturing for agricultural implements; the two companies merged in 1912. The Star Manufacturing building at 2 East Main Street has housed Otto Engineering since 1977 and is documented in the Historic American Buildings Survey.

For decades Carpentersville remained a small industrial village along Main Street, the only highway bridge across the Fox between Dundee and Algonquin. In the mid-1950s, developer Leonard W. Besinger transformed the area by building the Meadowdale subdivision and the Meadowdale Shopping Center, which opened in 1957 and grew to more than 50 stores anchored by Wieboldt's, Carson Pirie Scott, and W.T. Grant, plus an indoor ice rink. Besinger also built the Meadowdale International Raceway, a 3.27-mile road course that operated from 1958 to 1969 and is now Raceway Woods Forest Preserve. From the 1990s onward, the village extended west along Randall Road with new subdivisions and retail, completing the shift from a 19th-century factory town to a suburban Chicago community.