The first European settler in the area was Absalom Wells in 1833. He built a log cabin where the Vincennes Trail crossed Thorn Creek, but then moved farther west to where Chicago Road is now. The first permanent settlers were Adam and Phoebe Brown who built an inn at the intersection of Sauk Trail and the Vincennes Trace. In 1835, a large group from Ireland arrived. At this time, the town was known as Thorn Grove. The first school was built in 1836. The Reformed Presbytherian Church of Thorn Grove was formed in December 1843. The Batchhelder and McCoy homes in Thorn Grove were stops on the Underground Railroad. The first railroad arrived in 1853. The village was renamed Bloom. It was then renamed again in 1892 to Chicago Heights and incorporated as a village. In 1897, the village had twenty factories. By 1901, Chicago Heights had a population of over 5,000 and became a city. Its population nearly tripled in the next ten years.

What is now the suburb of Chicago Heights is an old community. Four Scots-Irish families first settled in the area near the crossing of the Sauk Trail and the Vincennes Trail, thirty miles south of Chicago, in the 1830’s. The small community was first known as Thorn Grove. After an influx of German Forty-Eighters, it became Bloom (1849) and finally, in 1892, the village of Chicago Heights; a decade later it was incorporated as a city. In the early 1890s a syndicate of Chicago businessmen headed by Charles Wacker and Martin Kilgallen formed the Chicago Heights Land Association and aggressively promoted the manufacturing potential of this satellite suburb, which already boasted excellent railroad service lily the Chicago and Eastern Illinois, the Elgin, Joliet, and Eastern, the Baltimore and Ohio, the Michigan Central railroads, and a terminal transfer line. Their efforts were rewarded with the decision of Inland Steel, Canedy-Otto (machine tool), and other large manufacturers to locate in the city, eventually making it one of the liveliest industrial centers of its size.

The land association, led by Scots-Irish settler William Donovan, set out to sell 25-foot homesites to workers moving into Chicago Heights from rural America and overseas. Donovan went on to build a real estate, insurance, and savings and loan empire, and he claimed he never lost a penny in mortgages extended to Italians. The city grew rapidly, attaining a population of 20,000 in 1920 and supporting a large downtown shopping district. Encouraged by the boosterism of the local semi-weekly paper, The Star, Chicago Heights residents proudly proclaimed their town the best manufacturing city its size in the country. But the 1920s saw the rise of Prohibition-related crime, lending a shady reputation to the town, a development whiz The Star and civic leaders strongly resented. After limping through the depressed 1930s, the industrial satellite city boomed during the war years and looked forward to great advances thereafter. The post-World War II period saw the expansion of suburban areas, the development of regional shopping centers, and a decline community identity. Today, after the proliferation of suburbia, the viral demise of the once-bustling downtown business district, the decline of the railroads, and the shift away from the glamour of heavy industry, Chicago Heights is no longer a community of rapid growth, and much of the optimism of the turn-of-the-century community boosters is gone. Though it maintains a population of over 40,000, Chicago Heights has; experienced what planners call "socioeconomic obsolescence". It is in the bottom fifty of Pierre De Vise’s ranking of Chicago’s 200 suburbs.

During the period from the 1890s to the present, political and social leadership has also changed. Though there is still some evidence of the Scots-Irish business establishment which dominated the community at the turn of the century, political and business leadership is now largely in the hands of descendants of the ethnic migrants, most notably the Italians. The 1970 census showed 3,092 of its residents of Italian birth and 8,783 claiming Italian as their mother tongue. If third and fourth generations are included, the number would easily doubled Italians are also the best-organized and most powerful political force in the community, dominating the city council, the school board, and the park board