Homes for sale in
Mount Prospect.

The land that became Mount Prospect sits on some of the highest ground in Cook County, and the railroad first came through the area around 1850. In the 1870s, entrepreneur Ezra Eggleston bought most of the land that later became downtown, built a train station, laid roads, divided the land into blocks, and gave the village its name: Mount for the high land and Prospect to proclaim the area's promise. His timing was poor, coming after the 1871 Chicago Fire and the Panic of 1873, and he eventually went bankrupt before several families continued developing the settlement. Mount Prospect was officially incorporated as a village in 1917, once its population reached the threshold of 300 residents.

For much of its early life Mount Prospect was a small farming community, but it grew rapidly in the post-World War II decades as Chicago suburbanization pushed northwest along the rail corridor. A major landmark of that era was Randhurst Mall, which opened in 1962 as one of the largest enclosed shopping centers in the country at the time. The mall was redeveloped beginning around 2008 into Randhurst Village, an open-air mixed-use center with retailers, restaurants, a cinema, office space, and a hotel. The Mount Prospect Historical Society preserves this heritage at its downtown campus, which includes the 1906 Dietrich Friedrichs house museum furnished to reflect 1917, the year of incorporation.