He was born  in Little Falls New York 1804 and arrived in Chicago in 1837 with his bride , horse and wagon, and only $22. In his early years in Illinois he had a roadside Inn in Schaumburg and became proprietor of a hotel and a grocery in Jefferson.

Snell bought from Cook County the right-of-way which extended from Chicago’s city limits to what was then the village of Jefferson,  giving Snell a monopoly on all the major roads that led into Chicago.

Snell  gave northwestern farmers and merchants no choice but to pay whatever he wanted if they wanted to market their goods. For years money literally rolled in what with the many Polish and bohemian picnics held outside the city limits, the many funerals, and the truck farmers coming to city markets.  He had supposedly been charging the outrageous fee of 2-1/2 cents per mile to travel from the center of the city along the 10 or so miles to the northwest. His tolls at one point provided him with nearly $800 a day with fees collected at several toll gates.

His tolls were incredibly disliked

A group of men dressed as wild Indians set fire to the Toll house one night in the spring of 1889. The plot to burn down that Toll house was hatched in a saloon at Milwaukee and California. Farmers would stop in the saloon and over several steins of beer grew unhappy about being separated from their hard-earned money at Snell’s gates only a few yards away at Milwaukee and Fullerton.

The toll road was only one of his enterprises. At the time of his death Amos was reputed to be Chicago was wealthiest property owner’s fortune was estimated at more than $3 million. Besides the real estate he owned in the city, he possessed large tracts in Jefferson, Park Ridge, Schaumburg and in the State of Iowa.

Amos J. Snell, the millionaire real estate owner and acknowledged wealthiest land proprietor on the West Side, was shot dead in the hallway of his brown-stone residence, 1326 West Washington Blvd., at the northwest corner of Ada street and Washington boulevard, Wednesday morning at about 2 o’clock. The murder was described as one of the largest individual owners of real estate in the city and the “most sensational ever committed in Chicago,”

Police arrested William B. Tascott on his deathbed at the Cape Nome Gold Diggings in Alaska in 1889. But 21 years later, James Gillan, labeled a “professional crook” confessed on his deathbed that he, not Tascott, had killed Snell while burglarizing his home.

After Snell’s death, the city of Chicago, which had extended its boundaries into areas containing parts of the road, began to tear down the toll gates because toll roads were not permissible in the city. 

Snell died from shock and hemorrhage caused by pistol shot wounds. Over 2,000 people were reported to have attended the funeral held within the library at his residence. After the funeral over 100 carriages proceeded to Rose Hill Cemetery for the burial. Mr. Snell left a wife Henrietta, two daughters and a son. His children were all married at the time.Snell did not leave a will, and his heirs moved to secure his estate, particularly some 400 real estate properties and the valuable toll roads.

The next three listings below, the Northwestern plank Road, the Elston plank Road, in the Western plank extension were all owned by Amos Snell

also known as “Snell’s Road”, Originally designated as the “ lower trail”  atravel route originally established by Native Americans,

The plank road was originally built by the Northwestern Plank-Road Company under an 1849 grant by the state of Illinois. In September 1849 planks were laid 8 miles from the Galena Depot along Milwaukee Avenue as far as Oak Ridge which is now Irving Park Road. 8 miles out. In the next two years the mainline was extended 3 miles beyond Dutchman point (now Niles) toward Wheeling, a total of about 18 miles.

In 1870, Amos Snell purchased the Northwestern Plank-Road toll road. improved it with gravel but also erected more toll gates, it became a notorious toll road much to the public’s anger.

Source: Chicago & Cook County Cemeteries A Historical & Contemporary Resource

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In a cruel twist of fate, the diagonal roads that were the lifeblood of Gladstone Park and the northwest farmlands in the mid-1800s were free game once they exited the Chicago City limits. Like in frontier times, there were no laws regulating them. Anyone could buy them and treat them and the people who wanted to use them with impunity.

When local farmer-turned-businessman Amos J. Snell discovered the old Indian trails that merchants were traveling on were up for grabs, he bought N. Northwest Highway from the county in 1870, ripping out old planks and installing an even better roadbed of gravel. Then he charged tolls to pay for the improvements, according to Illinois Courts.gov. Somewhere along the way Snell also got ahold of the sometimes impassable byway we know now as N. Elston. Laying wood boards crosswise atop a log foundation spanning the mud pathway, he improved it to a plank road and also charged tolls. N. Milwaukee also came under his ownership and people began referring to it as the “Snell Toll Road,” according to Lee Diamond who gives bike tours of the area through ChicagoVelo.

Because Snell had a monopoly on all the major roads that led from the Gateway of Chicago into the city center, he gave northwestern farmers and merchants no choice but to pay whatever he wanted if they wanted to market their goods.

That much is known. What came next was murkier, especially since few well-regarded history sites weigh in on the matter.

Don Hayner and Tom McNamee of Streetwise Chicago place Snell back in the 1840s when he’d supposedly been charging the outrageous fee of 2-1/2 cents per mile to travel from the center of the city along the 10 or so miles to the northwest. By then his tolls provided him with nearly $800 a day with fees collected at three locations on N. Elston alone: its southern entry point at W. Division Street (near Goose Island), at W. Lawrence, and at the northern end where it merged with N. Milwaukee in Gladstone Park, they said.

Making it sound like a Laurel and Hardy slapstick routine, Hayner and McNamee described rankled local farmers taking matters into their own hands by dressing up as Native Americans and staging their own “tea party.” Just like the Sons of Liberty had done nearly 70 years earlier when they’d thrown tea into Boston Harbor to protest British taxes, the malcontents supposedly chopped down and burned the tollbooths, setting things straight. This story was repeated in comical terms over the Internet.

But it seems the real tale may be darker and from a different decade altogether. We catch up to Snell in 1888, by then a multimillionaire, when he was shot to death in his West Side home February 8 of that year as reported in the next day’s Chicago Tribune and reprinted on chicagology. Calling the murder of the largest individual owner of real estate in the city the “most sensational ever committed in Chicago,” the Tribune documented it in excruciating detail.

Presumably the case was closed after the police arrested suspected killer and family black sheep William B. Tascott on his deathbed at the Cape Nome Gold Diggings in Alaska in 1889. But in an unexpected twist 21 years later, James Gillan, labeled a “professional crook” by the December 4, 1910 The Inter Ocean Magazine, confessed on his deathbed that he, not Tascott, had killed Snell while burglarizing his home. But, reflecting on how many enemies the murdered man had made — and the fact that Gillan had an accomplice he would not identify — some authorities still consider the case unsolved.

So, what has this got to do with tolls? Well, slightly more than two years after the millionaire was killed, those who had had to pay to travel on the only major routes that existed from the center city to the northwest where Gladstone Park lay revolted. Instead of it being a lark like the earlier version of the story, they reportedly killed the toll collector in the process of burning down his gate and toll booth, ChicagoVelo’s Diamond maintained.

The infamous Amos Snell, Chicago toll-collecting tycoon and millionaire real estate owner of over 350 buildings who was murdered in his own home in a case that many do not consider solved. Did it have anything to do with the road rebellion incident two years later where merchants, resentful of paying to travel the miles of roads he owned from the center city out to the Northwest area of the city, killed the toll collector and burned down his gate and booth? Drawing from chicagology.

This version of the story gains more credence if we read accounts from the Illinois Courts. For not more than a month later, Snell’s family tried to take over the toll roads the patriarch had owned and the Illinois Supreme Court ruled they had no authority. The reason: Snell could not legally pass the right to collect tolls to his heirs. The family appealed, taking the case all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court which, in 1894, upheld the state’s decision.

Finally the roads Gladstonians know as N. Northwest Highway, N. Milwaukee, and N. Elston were free!

Source: 

May 25, 2018 

Toll roads cause great irritation with motorists across the country and in Illinois. Proponents argue that the roads are largely self-sufficient and paid for by those who use them, while opponents complain of the high tolls and the restrictions on freedom of movement. One interesting Illinois Supreme Court case in the nineteenth century concerned the inheritance of a Milwaukee Avenue toll road.

Amos J. Snell was a wealthy Chicago landlord with thousands of tenants. In 1870, he purchased the Northwestern Plank-Road toll road. The road was built by the Northwestern Plank-Road Company under an 1849 grant by the state of Illinois. Plank roads were so rough they were also known as corduroy roads, but they were an improvement over rutty dirt roads that instantly turned to mud after a good rain. The state authorized the company to finance the road with toll gates. Toll roads could not operate in the City of Chicago, but the beginning of the toll road — at Fullerton and Milwaukee — was not in the city limits at the time. The toll portion of the road ran all the way to the boundary of Lake and Cook counties, near Wheeling. When Snell bought the road, he improved it with gravel but also erected more toll gates, much to the public's anger.

By the 1880s, Snell was a millionaire with the toll road his most lucrative investment. On February 9, 1888, Snell was awakened by a burglar and murdered in his home. No one was ever charged for the murder, which made the national news, although many suspected Willie Tascott, who disappeared forever. Snell did not leave a will, and his heirs moved to secure his estate, particularly the valuable toll road.

After Snell's death, the city of Chicago, which had extended its boundaries into areas containing parts of the road, began to tear down the toll gates because toll roads were not permissible in the city. Snell’s heirs sued the City of Chicago to prevent the city from removing the gates. Snell's heirs contended that they had the right to operate the toll road because when Snell bought the road, the right to charge tolls was part of the agreement and noted in the sale contract. 

The Superior Court of Chicago ruled for the city, and the Snell heirs appealed to the Illinois Supreme Court, 133 Ill. 413 (1890). Justice Benjamin Magruder, writing for the Court, agreed with the Superior Court judgment, noting that the authority granted by the state to the old company was held by Snell as a life estate and the right to collect tolls could not be passed along forever to Snell's descendants despite what the sales agreement said. The continued authority to charge tolls was contrary to public policy and the ''free and untrammeled use [of roads] belongs to the public.'' Snell’s heirs then appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, 152 U.S. 191 (1894), which upheld the decision. The Court admitted that Snell might have secured the right to collect tolls perpetually if he had incorporated his business under the law. Failing to do that, he had nothing to pass on after his lifetime.

Milwaukee Avenue has been a “free and untrammeled” road ever since.

Source: https://www.illinoiscourts.gov/News/669/Illinois-Supreme-Court-History-Milwaukee-Avenue-Toll-Road-Case/news-detail/

The long diagonal route of Milwaukee Avenue is a clue that this road existed before the right-angle grid of city streets was built around it. Centuries before Chicago existed, Native Americans walked paths across the prairie along the west side of the Chicago River toward villages and hunting camps in what is now Forest Glen. Later travellers on horseback and in wagons followed a loosely-defined track across the prairie, meandering around low-lying wet areas. This network of trails eventually was paved to become Elston Avenue. The history of Milwaukee Avenue is more recent.

Detail of Albert F. Scharf's 1900 map of Indian Trails and Villages of Chicago as they existed in 1804

After the Potawatomi were driven from Illinois by the Treaty of Chicago in 1833 after the end of the Black Hawk War, government surveyors began dividing the open prairie land into sections and parcels. New Yorker Martin Kimbell arrived in 1836 and settled on 160 acres southwest of what is now Diversey and Kimball. 

Kimbell and later settlers harvested hay or plowed the prairie to plant crops. The market for their produce was Chicago, but the journey across the prairie could be difficult due to mud or dust, or impassable in springtime. For farmers living farther from the city, the trip might take several days even in good weather. 

In 1849 the state granted a 99-year charter to the Northwestern Plank Road, the first of several long-distance toll roads connecting outlying towns to Chicago on compass points. The new road cut diagonally eighteen miles across open land from the Des Plaines River near Wheeling to the west side of downtown, not far from Haymarket Square on Randolph Street where farmers sold their produce. At the western end the road divided into several smaller branches. 

Martin Kimbell was hired as superintendent to build the section of roadway through Logan Square and maintain it. Workers levelled a 16-foot wide roadbed and dug ditches alongside for drainage. In low-lying areas they placed thick planks sideways across stringers laid on the ground to raise the roadbed above the mud. There are several colorful legends telling how tavern owners along the way persuaded the surveyors to steer the road toward their establishments, but the finished route is a straight line with only one bend near Irving Park Rd. 

West of the Chicago city limits at Western Ave, the Plank Road was a toll road. The frame toll house which stood there was moved at some time in the 1870s to the northeast corner of Fullerton Ave (about in front of the modern 7-11). Seven other toll houses were located every few miles at Belmont, Jefferson Park, and farther down the road. The toll-keeper lived in the six room house and was on duty 24 hours a day to collect fares from travellers. A carriage drawn by four horses paid 4¢ per mile, a wagon drawn by one horse was 2¢ per mile, a horse and rider owed 1¢, and smaller amounts were due per sheep, hog or goat driven along the road. 

1889 Tribune illustration of one of the toll gates (not at Fullerton)

The toll house stood partway across the roadway, and at night a pole was lowered and padlocked to block passage. Anyone travelling at night would have to wake the toll-keeper and wait for him to unlock the gate. Signs warned travellers that sneaking around the gate would cost them a $25 fine. At times the toll-keeper chased down cheaters and even threatened to beat those who did not pay their fare. 

After almost two decades of use, the road was in need of repair. Jefferson Park real estate investor Amos Snell purchased the charter for the Northwestern Plank Road in 1870 and agreed to finance repairs. Snell added gravel over the planks in the wet areas and dredged the ditches. 

William Ringler

William Ringler worked for Snell as toll-keeper at Fullerton for fourteen years in the 1870s and 1880s. He later recalled with pride how he had managed to collect $790 on one busy Sunday from travellers headed to picnic grounds outside the city. The average take per day was usually $300 to $500. Ringler made a point to collect exact fares from wealthy carriages and farmers wagons alike. Even firemen and police officers had to stop and pay to pass. 

Within a few years the roadway was in rough shape again. Local residents as early as 1878 complained to the county board that the road was a nuisance and that the tolls collected were obviously not used for keeping it in good condition. By 1889 a Daily News reporter described the conditions of travel on a winter day: 

From Armitage avenue to Fullerton avenue, the most frequently traveled part of the road, is a dreary waste of mud, averaging three or four inches in depth. It isn't that clean, bearable sort of mud found on country roads, which is just the natural result of rain on the soil. But it is a cold, clammy, clinging kind of mud, the mixture of a thousand ingredients. It is just as if all the ugly things said about the Snell road by those who have to travel on it, and all the things they have thought and haven't said, and all the unconscionable impositions of which the management have been accused, and all the hard, unkindly feelings ever indulged in by the owners of the road or the patrons were real material entities and had been mixed up and reduced to a paste and spread on the road... The mud is of a smooth unctuous character, of the consistency of soft mortar... It is just of that quality that makes it spatter readily. A horse or vehicle passing through it soon becomes thoroughly plastered with it. 

Meanwhile Amos Snell amassed a fortune of a million dollars and become one of the wealthiest citizens in Chicago. He built a mansion on Washington Boulevard near fashionable Union Park. In 1881 he sold the western branches of the toll road to the county, but kept the three most lucrative toll booths at Fullerton, Belmont and Jefferson Park.

The city was growing around the toll road as the truck farms were subdivided and filled with cottages and two-flats. Lyndale and Belden streets just off Milwaukee were subdivided by developers John Johnston Jr. and Edwin Hinsdale in 1881-1883. The toll road in the midst of city streets became a hindrance to travel and a nuisance to local residents who lived next to it. 

The new streets provided ways for scofflaws to detour around the toll gate. A news article from 1886 mentions farmers using Belden as a side street to avoid the toll gate at Fullerton, though it is more likely they went down Medill, since what is now Sacramento Ave did not then connect to Belden. Snell made plans to build another toll gate at California to capture the detourers, and stockpiled supplies for its construction. Emanuel Buresh and John O'Fenloch, who both lived at California and Milwaukee next to where the new gate would be built, sued to stop its construction, arguing that it would obstruct access to their property unjustly. While the lawsuit was in court, local residents from Belden and perhaps Lyndale Street stole the long pole that Snell intended to use for the gate and chopped it up for firewood. 

In February 1887, voters in Section 36, which encompassed land south of Fullerton and east of Kedzie, voted to join the city. The stretch of Milwaukee south of Fullerton was now within city limits, though Snell's charter only allowed collecting tolls outside the city. In June 1889 the rest of Jefferson Park township was annexed to the city. 

After Amos Snell was murdered in his home in February 1888, his heirs continued collecting tolls, arguing that Snell's charter was part of their inheritance. The Chicago city council resolved that the toll houses were illegal and should be dismantled within five days, but political efforts to remove the tolls got bogged down in the courtroom and the toll-keepers kept collecting tolls. 

Local residents grew tired of waiting for a legal judgement. Rumors spread that someone should burn the hated toll houses down. Later, saloonkeeper Joseph Kandlik claimed the plot was hatched at his barroom at the southeast corner of California and Milwaukee. 

William Landshaft's photograph of the Fullerton toll house on May 3, 1890, reproduced in Alfred Bull's 1911 The Township of Jefferson Ill.

On Wednesday night, May 1, 1890, a posse of forty to fifty men in wagons drove up to the Fullerton toll gate and confronted toll keeper Ed Smith, telling him to pack his bags and get out. They smashed the small gate house and gate pole and pushed the wreckage into the ditch, then rode on to the Belmont toll gate and did the same. 

That Friday around midnight an even bigger crowd of as many as 200 marched on the toll house, shouting "Smash them down!" Ed Smith and his wife ran to alert the fire department. The crowd first placed many of the Smith family's belongings out on the curb and then set fire to the toll house. As the flames grew, the people ran excitedly around the bonfire. Police and fire crews soon arrived, doused the flames and arrested six men for arson. 

While some modern-day retellings blame frustrated farmers for burning the toll booth, it was more likely neighbors living on the new streets around Milwaukee who were fed up with the toll road obstruction. How many long-ago Lyndale neighbors were in the mob that night? 

The following morning, William Landshaft, a house painter and amateur photographer then living at 2903 W. Belden, set up his bulky tripod in the street and captured an image of the burned toll house. Several men and boys stand on a platform in front of the house, and a man holding a horse signals to another. The embers from the fire must have cooled, as it appears a woman or girl is sitting inside a damaged doorway of the house. 

To the left is a glimpse of still-remaining prairie, several feet below the level of the road. On the right, a curb of Fullerton can be seen, which ran behind the toll house. Beyond the curb is another patch of prairie and in the distance a few of the new houses along Belden Ave. 

Two weeks after the burning of the toll house, the Illinois Supreme Court decided: Snell's toll road charter could not be inherited and all of the toll booths must go. Milwaukee Avenue would become a regular city street and in time it would be lined with houses and businesses covering over the prairie. 

In the early 1900s, former toll keeper William Ringler ran a saloon at 2900 W. Fullerton, the building seen behind the toll house. No doubt the story of the uprising was told and retold there until it became a bit of a legend. Perhaps it was also told a few blocks away, where Charlie Kandlik eventually inherited his father's saloon at California and Milwaukee. 

72-year-old Kandlik retold the tale in all its detail to a skeptical Tribune reporter in 1955. In his version he knew all the leaders of the plot personally. He saw them all dancing around the fire in Indian headdresses like a latter-day Boston Tea Party. And in the famous photo from the next morning, that was him right there on the left. 

The colorful legend has captivated many over the years. In 1928 and 1939 neighborhood festivals in Jefferson Park staged a pageant reenactment of the legendary incident that allowed free travel for all on Milwaukee Avenue.

Source:

"Meanwhile Amos Snell amassed a fortune of a million dollars and become one of the wealthiest citizens in Chicago. He built a mansion on Washington Boulevard near fashionable Union Park. In 1881 he sold the western branches of the toll road to the county, but kept the three most lucrative toll booths at Fullerton, Belmont and Jefferson Park.

Source: https://www.wurlington-bros.com/Marvelous/Lyndale/TollHouse.html

The Unsolved Murder of Amos Snell…
In the three decades since he had built a log cabin near the southwest corner of the original boundary of Niles Centre in 1857, Amos J. Snell had been a busy man. Acquiring hundreds of acres of land now on the north side of Chicago, he made a fortune selling timber to the new railroads and then garnered even more income by using the land he cleared to construct crude cabins to sell to new arrivals in the area.
Snell bought the Northwest Plank Road (Milwaukee Avenue) from a settler named Gould even though it was already beginning to suffer the fateful demise of all plank roads. In time, Snell rebuilt the entire road, however, using a gravel surface much more resistant to the ravages of time, and extended it northward to Wheeling. He also added a number of new tollgates, including one at Fullerton, Belmont, Jefferson and Leland Avenues. By the 1880s, each of these tollgates could take in $400 or more on a busy day. On some Sunday afternoons the gate at Fullerton collected more than $700, its coffers swelled with tolls from picnickers and visitors to the new cemeteries established north (in those days) of Chicago.
“One night in 1888,” Bertha Rosche wrote in her manuscript, Setting Down the Record …, “Snell was murdered in his home. Clues were few, and suspicions were many. It had appearances of being an inside job. A nephew, Willie Tascott, became the prime object of the search. Detective work spread through the nation, and trails were picked up in Europe. The case dragged on and all leads faded out. Neither Tascott nor other suspects ever were caught.”
The motive for the crime was never discovered, but it is known that many users of the toll roads in northern Illinois were becoming increasingly resentful of the fees they were compelled to pay for driving wagons on private roads. Complaints were many, as were attempts to dodge the toll by driving around the tollgates. Whether the culprit was Willie Tascott or a disgruntled toll-road traveler remains a mystery.

A Lively Decade

The 1890s began riotously. Early in May 1890, a group of farmers disguised as Indians attacked the tollgate, then owned by the heirs of Amos Snell, on Milwaukee Avenue at Fullerton. Angered that the Cook County Board had not taken fast action on their complaint made April 28 over high fees for the toll road, the ersatz Indians chased away the toll keeper shortly after midnight and burned his house and the tollgate to the ground. When police arrived, they did nothing to stop the mob, apparently sympathetic with their views.

The event to the south had an immediate effect on the residents of Niles Centre. Shortly after the attack, Cook County purchased the rights to Milwaukee Avenue from Amos Snell’s heirs, and those to Lincoln Avenue from Henry Harms. Although a single tollbooth remained on Milwaukee Avenue as late as 1892, the entire toll-road system was then abolished by the county. Both roads, once plank roads and later gravel roads, have remained public property ever since. But there is evidence that the county had as much trouble maintaining the roads as private owners had in earlier years. Testimony to that fact is found in this recorded anecdote. Near the end of the decade, in 1899, George H. Klehm stood for a week on Lincoln Avenue asking every passing teamster to haul a load of gravel to improve the road, which was sometimes nearly impassable to Chicago. In addition to 30 loads of broken bricks donated by two area brickyards to use as road fill, Klehm finally succeeded in getting 169 loads of gravel hauled free.

The whole subject of roads became increasingly important throughout the decade. Around 1892, two village residents, John Noesen and slightly later Henry Heinz, became the first area owners of motorcars. Without a single paved road in the village or the county, early automobile trips had to be at the least joltingly adventurous.

Source: Stokie Centennial Book

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He was born  in Little Falls New York 1804 andarrived in Chicago in 1837 with his bride , horse and wagon, and only $22. In his early years in Illinois he had a roadside Inn in Schaumburg and became proprietor of a hotel and a grocery in Jefferson.

Snell bought from Cook County the right-of-way which extended from Chicago’s city limits to what was then the village of Jefferson,  giving Snell a monopoly on all the major roads that led into Chicago.

Snell  gave northwestern farmers and merchants no choice but to pay whatever he wanted if they wanted to market their goods. For years money literally rolled in what with the many Polish and bohemian picnics held outside the city limits, the many funerals, and the truck farmers coming to city markets.  He had supposedly been charging the outrageous fee of 2-1/2 cents per mile to travel from the center of the city along the 10 or so miles to the northwest. His tolls at one point provided him with nearly $800 a day with fees collected at several toll gates.

His tolls were incredibly disliked

A group of men dressed as wild Indians set fire to the Toll house one night in the spring of 1889. The plot to burn down that Toll house was hatched in a saloon at Milwaukee and California. Farmers would stop in the saloon and over several steins of beer grew unhappy about being separated from their hard-earned money at Snell’s gates only a few yards away at Milwaukee and Fullerton.

The toll road was only one of his enterprises. At the time of his death Amos was reputed to be Chicago was wealthiest property owner’s fortune was estimated at more than $3 million. Besides the real estate he owned in the city, he possessed large tracts in Jefferson, Park Ridge, Schaumburg and in the State of Iowa.

Amos J. Snell, the millionaire real estate owner and acknowledged wealthiest land proprietor on the West Side, was shot dead in the hallway of his brown-stone residence, 1326 West Washington Blvd., at the northwest corner of Ada street and Washington boulevard, Wednesday morning at about 2 o’clock. The murder was described as one of the largest individual owners of real estate in the city and the “most sensational ever committed in Chicago,”

Police arrested William B. Tascott on his deathbed at the Cape Nome Gold Diggings in Alaska in 1889. But 21 years later, James Gillan, labeled a “professional crook” confessed on his deathbed that he, not Tascott, had killed Snell while burglarizing his home.

After Snell’s death, the city of Chicago, which had extended its boundaries into areas containing parts of the road, began to tear down the toll gates because toll roads were not permissible in the city. 

Snell died from shock and hemorrhage caused by pistol shot wounds. Over 2,000 people were reported to have attended the funeral held within the library at his residence. After the funeral over 100 carriages proceeded to Rose Hill Cemetery for the burial. Mr. Snell left a wife Henrietta, two daughters and a son. His children were all married at the time.Snell did not leave a will, and his heirs moved to secure his estate, particularly some 400 real estate properties and the valuable toll roads.

The next three listings below, the Northwestern plank Road, the Elston plank Road, in the Western plank extension were all owned by Amos Snell

also known as “Snell’s Road”, Originally designated as the “ lower trail”  atravel route originally established by Native Americans,

The plank road was originally built by the Northwestern Plank-Road Company under an 1849 grant by the state of Illinois. In September 1849 planks were laid 8 miles from the Galena Depot along Milwaukee Avenue as far as Oak Ridge which is now Irving Park Road. 8 miles out. In the next two years the mainline was extended 3 miles beyond Dutchman point (now Niles) toward Wheeling, a total of about 18 miles.

In 1870, Amos Snell purchased the Northwestern Plank-Road toll road. improved it with gravel but also erected more toll gates, it became a notorious toll road much to the public’s anger.

.

From the Northwestern Road at Oak Ridge (Irving Park Road in Jefferson) , the Western Plank Road ran west to the boundary of Du Page County, where it connected with the Elgin and Genoa Plank Road, which ran through Elgin to Genoa in Kendall County, fifty miles from Chicago.

also known as the Snell toll road – originally an Indian trail designated the “upper trail”. Elston Avenue in the early days was originally known asElston Road .

It was named after Daniel Elston,(1780-1855) a London merchant who immigrated to Chicago in the early 1800s established several businesses, making soap, candles, bricks, beer and whiskey; he also served as a school inspector and an alderman, and founded a bank. Elston is buried in Graceland Cemetery

There were three toll houses on N. Elston alone: its southern entry point at W. Division Street (near Goose Island), one just south of Lawrence Avenue at Elston, and another farther north where it merged with N. Milwaukee.

Describe by Andreas “as a crooked wagon track leading from Kinzie Street through Jefferson to the Western part of Niles and thence on through Northfield toward Deerfield it runs parallel for about 9 miles with Milwaukee with the two merge “

William Ringler one of the old toll gate keepers in an interview once said:

 “I was on the job for 14 years and I guess I took in more money than any other gatekeeper. One Sunday Polish and Bohemian picnics at Niles in Des Plaines, and the new cemeteries then opening up my receipts were $790. The average from all gates at that time was about $100 a day.”

Both Elston plank Road and the Northwest plank Road on Milwaukee continued to operate until 1889 when the Township of Jefferson was annexed the city of Chicago. Indignation of farmers staged a modern version of the Boston tea party and organized bands of fake Indians that swept down upon both plank roads chop down the toll gates and build great bonfires there with as a token of their Declaration of Independence further paying a toll for the right to travel on these great highways.

If you have enjoyed this story about plank roads and Amos Snell, please leave a comment below. 

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Thanks, Barry A. Fleig

And while you’re at it, check out this related story of the cemetery once along the Western Plank Road in Jefferson (now Irving Park Road)

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