Homes for sale in
Morton Grove.

Morton Grove grew up around a railroad stop on the Chicago, Milwaukee and St. Paul Railroad, which bought the old Miller's Mill site in 1872 and laid track through the area. The stop was named to honor Levi Parsons Morton, a New York financier of the railroad who later served as United States Vice President. The first subdivision of 177 lots was platted in 1891, and the village formally incorporated on December 24, 1895, eight days before Morton became Governor of New York. The first mayor, George Harrer, was of German descent and became the namesake of the village's largest park.

The area was first settled by English farmers around 1830 to 1832, followed by German and Luxembourg immigrants who cleared the timberland, and John Miller built a water-powered sawmill near the Chicago River shortly after 1841. In the early 1900s the village became a center of commercial floriculture, as the Poehlman Brothers grew their greenhouse operation into one of the world's largest floral firms before going bankrupt in the Great Depression. After World War II, the opening of the Edens Expressway cut commuting time into Chicago and drove rapid growth, with population soaring from 3,926 in 1950 to 20,533 in 1960. The community also became notable in 1981 as the first town in America to prohibit handgun possession, a ban it lifted in 2008.