The village is named for François Jace Bourbonnais
père, a fur trapper, hunter and agent of the
American Fur Company, who had married a Native American woman and arrived in the area near the fork of two major Indian trails and the
Kankakee River circa 1830.
John Jacob Astor had founded the company in 1808, and when the United States banned foreign (i.e. British and Canadian) companies (such as the
Hudson's Bay Company) from competing in the country after the
War of 1812, it flourished. By 1830 it had a near monopoly of fur trading in the midwest, but the number of local trappable wild animals had declined. In 1832,
Noel Le Vasseur arrived as the Astor firm local fur trading agent, establishing a trading post in the area, and becoming the first permanent non-
Native American settler. He married
Watseka, niece of a
Potawatomi chieftain, and after the Potawatomi were relocated to Iowa, recruited
French-Canadiens to settle around his store. The Potawatomi were forced to move westward by a series of treaties culminating in the
Treaty of Tippecanoe, which Congress ratified in 1833. The treaty reserved two sections for Potawanomi chief Me-she-ke-te-no, and one section each for Catish (Mrs. Bourbonnais Sr.) and
Manteno (daughter of Francois Bourbonnais Jr.). After establishment of the new Catholic
diocese of Chicago, missionary Fr.
Stephen Badin briefly settled in Bourbonnais Grove in 1846, before retiring further south. In 1853, the Illinois legislature split
Iroquois County, and Bourbonnais Grove became part of new
Kankakee County. Because the
Illinois Central Railroad ran through
Kankakee, founded in 1854, it became the county seat, with Bourbonnais Grove as one of several townships. In 1858, residents built the Maternity of the Blessed Virgin Mary Church, and soon nuns of the
Congregation of Notre Dame arrived from Canada to teach and provide nursing care. Two years later they founded Notre Dame Academy. In 1865
clerics of St. Viator founded
St. Viator College for boys. After a referendum in 1875, the settlement incorporated as the Village of Bourbonnais, with George R. LeTourneau as its first mayor, and trustees Francois Sequin, Joseph Legris, Alexis Gosselin, P.L. Monast, Alex LaMontagne, Joseph Goulet, Jacob Thyfault and Len Bessette. LeVasseur died, aged 80, four years later. After enrollment declines in the early 20th century, in 1940, the Catholic institutions were bought out by what became
Olivet Nazarene University, since the Protestant school in nearby
Vermillion County had burned down the previous year. The original
French pronunciation of
Bourbonnais came to be
Anglicized over time to . In 1974, a state representative from Bourbonnais introduced a
resolution "correcting" the pronunciation of the town's name to , closer to the French. In 1976, for the U.S. Bicentennial, the Village Board passed a resolution making "ber-buh-NAY" the official pronunciation. In 1999, the town was the site of a major train wreck, the
Bourbonnais train accident. Bourbonnais was home of the summertime training camp of the
Chicago Bears professional football team from 2002 to 2019. In 2020, the team relocated their training camp to their headquarters at
Halas Hall in
Lake Forest, Illinois after major renovations of the building complex. ==Geography==