Built Twice for the Railroad, Never for a River
Hampshire Township organized in 1845, but the village itself was platted twice: first as 'Hampshire Center' in October 1874 by A.J. Willing and C.A. Fasseth, then relocated in 1876 to sit directly along the Chicago-Pacific Railroad line, where it incorporated that October by a 73-2 vote with Samuel Rowell as its first village president. By 1893, the farming community around that rail line had grown into the second-largest milk producing and shipping station in Illinois.
Illinois' Second-Largest Milk Depot Sits on Farmland Drainage
Of the eight communities in this coverage area, Hampshire sits farthest from the Fox River and has the least connection to any millsite or riverbank — its whole reason for being was a rail line serving dairy farms, not water power. That makes drainage here almost entirely a farmland-and-subdivision question: how the surrounding fields and street grading route rainwater across Kane County's clay-heavy glacial till, since there's no river level or historic milldam factored into how a Hampshire basement takes on water.