Homes for sale in
Stickney.

Until about 1900, most of what is now Stickney was covered by Mud Lake, a large marsh stretching from Chicago to Lyons and crossed by a historic portage trail between the Chicago and Des Plaines rivers. Mud Lake began receding after the Illinois and Michigan Canal was built in 1836, and by 1900 the Sanitary and Ship Canal had left it relatively dry, prompting developers to build on the reclaimed land with early German and Dutch farmer residents. The village is named for Alpheus B. Stickney, a railroad executive central to creating the Clearing Industrial District. Stickney Township was organized in 1901, and in 1913 the village of Stickney was established from township land.

As neighboring Cicero and Berwyn boomed in the 1920s, Stickney grew too, but the era also brought Al Capone and other criminals who set up brothels and speakeasies around 1920, with illegal gambling persisting into at least the 1950s. By the late 1930s the population was about 2,000, growing to 6,239 by 1960 as postwar home construction peaked in the 1950s and the residential area concentrated in the western end of town. In 1949 Commonwealth Edison began building a coal-fired power plant straddling Stickney and Forest View, and the two villages later jointly formed the Stickney-Forest View Library District in 1953. The Metropolitan Water Reclamation District's Stickney treatment plant, opened in phases since 1930, is the largest of its kind in the world and remains the village's largest employer.