Homes for sale in
Hillside.

The area that became Hillside was first settled in October 1833 by Thomas Reed Covell and his family, and German Lutheran immigrants soon established farms and built the community's first school and church near Wolf Road and 22nd Street in the 1840s. Although farming dominated the early economy, in the 1850s Marion Covell discovered a major limestone deposit just below the surface of his property; the quarry he opened in 1854 operated until the mid-1970s and supplied crushed stone for road building across metropolitan Chicago. The village took its name from the local Illinois Central Railroad station, called "Hillside" because westbound trains had to climb a grade at that point, and the community was formally founded in 1905.

Hillside's first significant residential growth came in the 1920s as farmland was subdivided and sold, and major institutions such as St. Domitilla Roman Catholic Church and the Mater Dolorosa Seminary acquired large holdings, with the seminary building now housing the village's government offices. The community's population quadrupled after World War II, rising from 1,080 in 1940 to 7,794 by 1960 as residential construction filled in the open land. In 1956 the Hillside Retail Mall, a pioneering regional shopping center, opened beside the newly completed Congress (now Eisenhower) Expressway, followed by a hotel, theaters, and an industrial park. The mall's prominence was short-lived as larger malls opened in the 1960s, and most of it was demolished in 1997.