Homes for sale in
Channahon.

Long before incorporation, the land at the confluence of the DuPage, Des Plaines, and Kankakee rivers was home to Mound Builders thousands of years ago and, by the early 1830s, to the Potawatomi, with whom the first settlers had friendly relations. Those settlers adopted the Potawatomi name Channahon, translated as meeting of the waters. When construction of the Illinois and Michigan Canal began in 1836, Channahon's location was chosen as the site for two of the waterway's locks. In 1845 Myrvin Benjamin plotted a settlement to take advantage of the rivers and the nearly finished canal, and the community was officially named Channahon when the township organized in 1850.

By the 1870s the canal town had a post office, a schoolhouse, a Methodist church, blacksmith shops, and several stores, but the rise of the railroads late in the nineteenth century drew commerce away and the village shrank. Channahon was first incorporated in 1896, then dissolved in 1908, and spent the first half of the twentieth century as a mostly agricultural community. It was reincorporated on December 11, 1961. In the decades that followed, proximity to Interstates 55 and 80 spurred rapid industrial growth, including a refinery, petrochemical plants, and large distribution facilities, and Channahon grew into the affluent, semi-rural suburb it is today.