Drive the wooded lanes off Higgins Road in South Barrington and the houses sit back from the street, half hidden behind oaks the developers were careful not to fell. The mailboxes read Patel and Shah and Reddy as often as they read anything else. The story of Indians in South Barrington is the story of a quiet Illinois village that, in a single generation, became one of the most heavily Asian suburbs in the Chicago region, and one of the wealthiest places in the state.
The Place
South Barrington is a village in the north-west corner of Cook County, incorporated in 1959 and laid out around the idea of space. Lots are large, roads curve through preserved woodland, and there is almost no commercial frontage outside one corner.
It is small. The 2020 census counted 5,077 residents across roughly seven and a half square miles. It is also rich: the median household income sits above 183,000 dollars and the median home value near 842,000 dollars in 2020 figures, with later estimates pushing both higher.
What makes it unusual is not the wealth, which it shares with neighbours like Inverness and Barrington Hills. It is who the wealth now belongs to.
How It Became Indian
A suburb built for room to breathe
When South Barrington incorporated in 1959, it was a place for Chicagoans who wanted acreage and horses within commuting distance of the city. For decades it stayed overwhelmingly white. As recently as 2000, the census recorded the village as roughly 81 per cent white and about 14 per cent Asian.
The pull factors were the same ones that draw affluent families anywhere: large homes, low crime, and above all the schools. South Barrington feeds into Barrington Community Unit School District 220, a high-performing district spanning a 72 square-mile area and centred on Barrington High School.
The professionals arrive
The Indians who moved to South Barrington in the 1990s and 2000s were rarely first arrivals in America. Most had landed somewhere else first: a graduate programme, a hospital residency, a first job in the city or an inner suburb. South Barrington was the move you made once you had succeeded.
The Chicago metro had long been a magnet for Indian doctors, engineers and IT professionals, many drawn by the H-1B visa boom of the late 1990s and the dense cluster of corporate offices in the north-west suburbs around Schaumburg and Hoffman Estates. As careers matured, families looked north and west for bigger houses and the District 220 catchment.
For a physician at one of the Northwest Community or Ascension hospitals, or an engineer at a corporate campus along the Interstate 90 corridor, South Barrington was within a sensible commute while feeling a world away from the office. The village offered something the denser suburbs could not: trees, quiet and the kind of square footage that an Indian household, often multigenerational, could actually use.
That last point matters. Many of these homes were bought with a grandparent’s room in mind, a space where elderly parents could live for part of the year, and a kitchen large enough to cook for a wedding’s worth of guests. The houses were American, but the lives inside them kept Indian shape.
The tipping point
The shift was fast and measurable. The Asian share of the population climbed from about 14 per cent in 2000 to just over 40 per cent in 2020, while the white share fell from roughly 81 per cent to about 53 per cent over the same two decades. By more recent estimates the Asian figure has approached 45 per cent.
Much of that Asian population is South Asian. Indian families clustered here for reasons that compound: once a community establishes, the temples, grocers, restaurants and friendship networks make the next family’s decision easier. A child who sees classmates named Sharma and Krishnan does not feel like the only one.
This pattern repeats across the country. The same forces shaped the Indian community in Fishers, Indiana and the technology corridor that produced Indians in McLean, Virginia, where school quality and proximity to professional work drove the same kind of settlement.
A community anchored by faith
No Hindu temple sits inside South Barrington itself, but the village is ringed by some of the most significant Hindu institutions in the Midwest, and that proximity matters. Faith infrastructure is part of what makes a place liveable for an immigrant family.
The Hindu Temple of Greater Chicago in Lemont, founded in 1977 and with its Rama temple consecrated on 4 July 1986, is the older anchor to the south. To the west, the BAPS Shri Swaminarayan Mandir in Bartlett, inaugurated on 7 August 2004, brought hand-carved marble and limestone temple architecture to the prairie. These are weekend destinations for South Barrington families, an hour or less by car.
The Landmarks
Willow Creek Community Church, 67 East Algonquin Road, South Barrington. The village’s most recognisable building is not Indian at all, but it defines the local geography. The vast evangelical megachurch is one of the largest in the United States, and its sprawling campus is the landmark by which residents of every background orient themselves.
The Arboretum of South Barrington, 100 West Higgins Road. Opened in 2008 on the former Klehm Tree Farm and Nursery, this open-air lifestyle centre is where the village does its everyday gathering: dinner out, a film, a stroll. Its restaurants and shops have become the de facto town square for families who otherwise live behind trees.
BAPS Shri Swaminarayan Mandir, 1851 Wise Road, Bartlett. A 27-acre complex inaugurated in 2004, built from roughly 40,000 stone pieces carved in Rajasthan and shipped from Italy and Turkey. The American Institute of Architects named it among Illinois’s 150 Great Places. For many South Barrington families it is the temple of choice for festivals and milestones.
Hindu Temple of Greater Chicago, 10915 Lemont Road, Lemont. Founded in 1977 by South Indian community leaders and set on eighteen acres of bluff land, with the Rama temple consecrated in 1986 and a Ganesha-Shiva-Durga temple added in 1994. It remains the spiritual home for an older generation of the region’s Hindus.
Patel Brothers, 873 East Schaumburg Road, Schaumburg. The suburban outpost of the grocery chain founded on Chicago’s Devon Avenue in 1974. For South Barrington kitchens it is the reliable source of toor dal, fresh curry leaves and the right brand of basmati, a short drive south-east.
Raj Palace, Schaumburg Road, Schaumburg. A few doors from Patel Brothers in the stretch locals call Little India, this North Indian restaurant cooks with spices bought from the grocery next door. It is the kind of place families fall back on when no one wants to cook after temple.
Barrington High School, 616 West Main Street, Barrington. The academic engine of the whole story. The District 220 student body is roughly 17 per cent Asian, and for many Indian families in South Barrington the chance to send a child here was the reason they chose the village in the first place.
Where They Came From
The Indians of South Barrington do not trace to a single village or state in India. They are a professional diaspora, gathered from across the subcontinent and reassembled in a Cook County suburb.
Gujarati families, often with the surnames that fill the temple registers and the grocery aisles, form one strand, part of a mercantile and professional migration that also built the Patel Brothers empire. South Indian families from Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh and Karnataka form another, the same communities that founded the Lemont temple in the 1970s. Punjabi, Bengali and Maharashtrian families round out the mix.
What they share is less a place of origin than a path: higher education, an English-language professional career, and a climb through the American suburbs that ended at a large house behind oak trees. It is a pattern that links South Barrington to Indians in Chesterfield, Missouri and to Indians in Waxhaw, North Carolina, affluent suburbs that filled with the same generation for the same reasons.
South Barrington Today
Today South Barrington is something the village’s 1959 founders could not have pictured: a wooded, expensive, almost rural-feeling suburb where close to half the residents are Asian and a large share of those are Indian. The transformation happened without fanfare, lot by lot, family by family.
It is not a Little India in the way Devon Avenue or the Schaumburg Road strip are. There is no commercial Indian district, no row of sari shops. The Indian presence here is residential and quiet, expressed in the names on the school roll, the cars heading to Lemont and Bartlett on festival mornings, and the lights that appear along the curving lanes when the festival calendar turns.
There is a particular kind of pride in this arrangement. The families who reached South Barrington did not need a community to lean on in the way new arrivals do. They had already made it. The temples and grocers are a short drive away precisely because the village itself is meant to be a refuge from the daily grind, a place to come home to rather than a place to set up shop.
The village sits within a wider belt of north-west suburban diversity. Just to the south, Indians in Schaumburg, Illinois built the commercial hub that South Barrington’s residential community leans on, while the Chinese community in Schaumburg and the long-established Jewish community of Glencoe tell parallel stories of how Chicago’s affluent suburbs were remade by ambition. For a fuller picture, the village’s recorded history reads as a straightforward account of incorporation and growth, with the demographic shift visible only in the census tables.
Frequently Asked Questions
How large is the Indian community in South Barrington, Illinois?
South Barrington had about 5,077 residents in the 2020 census, of whom just over 40 per cent were Asian, with later estimates near 45 per cent. A large share of that Asian population is South Asian, making Indians in South Barrington one of the defining communities of this small, affluent village.
Why did so many Indian families move to South Barrington?
The main draws were the highly rated Barrington 220 school district, large wooded lots, low crime and proximity to the north-west suburban job corridor around Schaumburg and Hoffman Estates. For many Indian professionals it was a move made after career success, not on first arrival in America.
Is there a Hindu temple in South Barrington?
There is no Hindu temple within the village itself, but South Barrington families have several major temples nearby. The Hindu Temple of Greater Chicago in Lemont and the BAPS Shri Swaminarayan Mandir in Bartlett are both within about an hour’s drive.
Where do South Barrington’s Indian families shop for groceries and food?
Many head to the Schaumburg Road strip in nearby Schaumburg, sometimes called Little India, where Patel Brothers grocery and restaurants such as Raj Palace serve the region. The original Patel Brothers opened on Chicago’s Devon Avenue in 1974.
What schools serve South Barrington?
South Barrington is part of Barrington Community Unit School District 220, which serves a 72 square-mile area and includes Barrington High School. The district’s student body is roughly 17 per cent Asian, reflecting the wider settlement of Indian and other Asian families across the Barrington area.
How wealthy is South Barrington?
South Barrington is one of the wealthier communities in Illinois. The 2020 census recorded a median household income above 183,000 dollars and a median home value near 842,000 dollars, with more recent estimates higher still, which is part of why Indians in South Barrington tend to be established professional families.
If your family’s story passed through South Barrington, or any of the places Indians have made home in America, Atlas of Home can trace that journey. From a graduate programme or a hospital residency, to a house behind the oaks off Higgins Road, to wherever you are now.