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He drew Chicago's first map, then turned down land for cash

James Thompson was a surveyor from South Carolina who settled as a young man near Kaskaskia in southern Illinois and spent the rest of his life there, working as a teacher, county official, and above all a surveyor of roads and county boundaries. In 1830 he was hired to plat the two planned endpoints of the Illinois and Michigan Canal, finishing the eastern one, a small settlement on Lake Michigan, in early August. That settlement was Chicago, and Thompson's grid of 58 blocks, bounded by what are now Kinzie, Madison, State, and Desplaines streets, became the founding document of the city. He chose many of its earliest street names, including ones honoring his home county and nearby historical figures, then went back home to Randolph County, taking a cash payment instead of land in the town he had just laid out.

Back in southern Illinois, Thompson resumed a long career as a local surveyor, probate judge, and militia officer, serving in the Black Hawk War and settling the estates of early Illinois politicians. Surveying ran in the family, and several of his sons and other relatives took up the profession too. He died in 1872 and was buried in an unmarked grave, his role in founding Chicago largely forgotten for decades even as the city he had platted grew explosively, passing a million residents by 1890.

Before Thompson's survey, the word "Chicago" had loosely described several places around the southern end of Lake Michigan, but his plat fixed it to a specific, sellable piece of land and let its settlers hold formal title to their lots. The grid he drew became the template for the city's later expansion and its distinctive street-numbering system, with the intersection of State and Madison later chosen as its official address baseline precisely because it had been his survey's own reference point. That connection was rediscovered only in 1917, after an alderman asked why the baseline sat so far from the city's geographic center, prompting an investigation that finally led Chicago to erect a monument on Thompson's long-neglected grave. His plat has since been marked on anniversaries, cited by newspapers as Chicago's literal birth certificate, and preserved in a Chicago museum, while a modern downtown development still carries the name of one of his original numbered blocks.

Thompson's grave went unmarked for decades; Chicago, by then a city of over a million, finally erected a monument over it in 1917.

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