About Liberty Restaurant, information coming soon!

The land that is now Libertyville was the property of the Illinois River Potawatomi Indians until August 1829, when economic and resource pressures forced the tribe to sell much of their land in northern Illinois to the U.S. government for $12,000 plus an additional $12,000 in goods, plus an annual delivery of 50 barrels of salt.

In 1836, during the celebrations that marked the 60th anniversary of the U.S. United States Declaration of Independence, the community voted to call itself Independence Grove. The next year the village got its first practicing physician, Dr. Jesse Foster, and its first lawyer, Horace Butler, after whom Butler Lake is named. It also got a post office in that year, an event that forced another name change, because of an already existing Independence Grove elsewhere in the state. On April 16, 1837, the new post office (possibly located in Vardin's former cabin) was registered under the name Libertyville.

Libertyville's downtown area was largely destroyed by fire in 1895, and the village board mandated brick to be used for reconstruction--resulting in a village center whose architecture is substantially unified by both period and building material.

The National Trust for Historic Preservation, which gave Libertyville a Great American Main Street Award, called the downtown "a place with its own sense of self, where people still stroll the streets on a Saturday night, and where the tailor, the hometown bakery, and the vacuum cleaner repair shop are shoulder to shoulder with gourmet coffee vendors and a microbrewery."

The population of the Village, approximately 22,000 (Census Bureau, 2006 Estimate), has more than doubled since 1960, as the Village has shared in the economic growth of the Chicago metropolitan area. An ongoing effort to restore and preserve historic Libertyville contributes to the traditional home town atmosphere in the Village.

While now, a basically built out community, the Village has expanded from its original borders and is currently bounded roughly by Saint Mary’s Road to the east, Midlothian Road on the west, Route 137 to the north, and Hollister Drive to the south. Libertyville is today a modern community which embraces its important history.