Fox River Grove (FRG) is a village in Algonquin Township, McHenry County and Cuba Township, Lake County, Illinois, United States. In 1919, the village of Fox River Grove officially incorporated, becoming the ninth village in McHenry County. The Grove is situated along the southern shore of the Fox River. The population was 4,854 at the 2010 census.[3] Residents refer to themselves as “Grovers.”

Long before the arrival of Europeans, Native Americans called the land within Fox River Grove home. The Ojibwe (also known as Chippewa) people continued to winter in the Fox River Valley into the 1860s. The women traded beadwork and purses with local settlers while the men trapped muskrat and mink, selling the pelts in nearby Barrington, Illinois. The area’s proximity to Northwest Highway (Route 14), a major military and trade road, enabled such commerce to thrive. The men also made fence posts for local farmers and would “spear fish at night using torches attached to the end of their birchbark canoes.”[4] When spring came, they traveled north to their summer lands in Wisconsin.[5] Between 1816 and 1833, the Ojibwe and U.S. government engaged in peace talks, resulting in several land cession treaties being signed. Eventually, all Ojibwe land in Illinois was taken by the federal government. The rapid increase of European-American settlers, coupled with pressures from the government and military, eventually forced this dynamic and proud people to leave the lands that would soon become FRG and relocate west of the Mississippi River.[6]