Map of Posen village, Illinois

Posen is a village in Cook County, Illinois, United States. Posen is the German-language name for the western Polish city of Poznań. The population of the village was 5,632 at the 2020 census.

Posen village overview:
Name:	Posen village
LSAD Code:	47
LSAD Description:	village (suffix)
State:	Illinois
County:	Cook County
Incorporated:	1900
Total Area:	1.17 sq mi (3.03 km²)
Land Area:	1.17 sq mi (3.03 km²)
Water Area:	0.00 sq mi (0.00 km²) 0%
Total Population:	5,632
Population Density:	4,817.79/sq mi (1,860.12/km²)
Area code:	708
FIPS code:	1761314
Website:	www.villageofposen.org

Online Interactive Map

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Posen online map. Source: Basemap layers from Google Map, Open Street Map (OSM), Arcgisonline, Wmflabs. Boundary Data from Database of Global Administrative Areas.

Posen location map. Where is Posen village?

Posen location on the U.S. Map. Where is Posen village. — Posen location on the U.S. Map.

Posen location on the Illinois map. Where is Posen village. — Location of Posen in Illinois.

History

The area that is now Posen was settled by farmers, mainly of Dutch and German origin, in the second half of the 19th century. In 1893 a Chicago-based real estate firm hired 75 agents in the Polish-speaking areas of Germany to sell land to Poles seeking to emigrate to the United States. Over the next few years the village emerged as a place largely inhabited by factory workers, mainly employed at nearby Harvey, who also had room on their lots for gardens. In 1894 the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Chicago established a mission to serve the Polish residents of Posen, which was elevated to parish status as St. Stanislaus the Martyr in 1898 (the church permanently closed in 2022).

In the 1930s the population of Posen was 98% of Polish origin, and in 1960 only 0.1% of the population was identified in the census as being not white, or 4 of the 4,513 inhabitants. In 1963 there were 7% black students that attended the Posen School. In 1990 Posen, having fallen to 4,226 inhabitants, was still 94.5% white, a large portion of this population being Polish. About 4% of the population identified as being both white and Hispanic, for an overall 7.3% or 310 people identifying as being Hispanic. In 2010 3,171 residents of Posen identified as Hispanic, representing the expansion of the Hispanic population to 10 times what it had been 20 years before (or an increase of more than 900% over 10 years). In the same time period the number of African American residents of the village increased from 60 (or 1.4% of the population) to 1,035. This means that the percentage rate of growth of the African American population of Posen over the last 20 years has been greater than that of the Hispanic population. While as late as 2004 the Encyclopedia of Chicago still referred to Posen as “predominantly Polish American” even then an actual examination of the 2000 census ancestry report would have shown that only a quarter of the population claimed to have Polish ancestry.