Hyde Park votes itself out of existence; Chicago becomes the nation's largest city by land

By 1889, Hyde Park Township had grown to 85,000 residents — more than twenty times its 1870 population — and its government was straining under the weight. On June 29, 1889, voters in Hyde Park and several neighboring townships chose annexation by Chicago, swayed by the city's promises of better water, sewerage, fire, and police services. The addition of Hyde Park's vast territory — stretching from Pershing Road south to 138th Street, and from State Street east to the Indiana line — pushed Chicago past every American city in land area and to second place in population. The township that real estate developer Paul Cornell had carved out of prairie in the 1850s had, in a single election, ceased to exist as a government…