Homes for sale in
Schiller Park.

The land that became Schiller Park was inhabited in the early 1800s by the Potawatomi, Ottawa, and Ojibwe peoples of the Three Fires Nation along the Des Plaines River, and an 1829 treaty deeded land on both sides of the river to Potawatomi chief Alexander Robinson. Beginning around 1850, German immigrant farmers arrived and took up land throughout the area, later joined by Italian, Polish, and Spanish settlers as the community grew through the 1870s. The community took shape around landowner William Kolze, who arrived in the 1880s, and the Wisconsin-Central Railroad began running through the area in 1886. The Village of Schiller Park was formally incorporated in 1914.

The village shares its name with the German playwright, poet, and historian Johann Christoph Friedrich von Schiller, one of Germany's most important classical writers, reflecting the area's strong German settler heritage. Growth was slow through the Depression, with a population of about 700 in 1930, but the post-war boom pushed the village past 5,000 residents by the mid-1950s. The 1960s brought the Tri-State Tollway, the explosive growth of neighboring O'Hare Airport, and the annexation of the Fairview, Frogtown, and Indian Park subdivisions, lifting the population to 8,600. By 1980, after a long-running battle with O'Hare over its expansion and noise, the population leveled off at about 11,000, roughly where it remains today.