Homes for sale in
Hodgkins.

The first Europeans to pass through the Hodgkins area were explorers Jacques Marquette and Louis Joliet, who paddled down the Des Plaines River in 1673. Permanent settlement remained sparse until around 1836, when Irish and Italian immigrants arrived to work on the Illinois and Michigan Canal, whose construction spurred the formation of many villages along its banks. The community went by several names over the years, including Polk, Novak, and Gary, the last said to derive from Garibaldi in recognition of the area's Italian laborers. In 1883, William and Jane Muxworthy sold land to the Kimball and Cobb Stone Company, which established a limestone quarry that became the village's foundational industry and drew waves of largely Italian immigrant workers.

The Village of Hodgkins was incorporated on July 1, 1896, and named for Jefferson Hodgkins, president of the Kimball and Cobb Stone Company and the first business to locate in the village. In the 1950s and 1960s, Hodgkins attracted motor freight terminals thanks to its flat, dry land and expressway access, becoming a natural distribution point between Chicago and the rest of the nation. After the freight industry declined in the late 1970s, the village created the McCook-Hodgkins Enterprise Zone in 1985 and a TIF district in 1986 to attract new commercial development, leading to the 1992 opening of The Quarry shopping center on vacated freight land. Quarrying continues today at the Vulcan Materials McCook Quarry spanning about 650 acres, and the UPS CACH facility remains the village's defining economic anchor.