On a Saturday morning in Lemont, the parking lot off 127th Street fills with families speaking a language older than Latin. Children carry violin cases and folk costumes into a 125,000 square foot former seminary, and for a few hours the affluent southwest suburb becomes the working heart of Lithuanian America. The story of the Lithuanians in Lemont, Illinois is the story of a people who lost their old neighbourhood in the city and built a new capital out of marble and memory.
The Place
Lemont sits where Cook, DuPage and Will counties meet, about thirty miles southwest of downtown Chicago, on a bluff above the Des Plaines River valley. It was founded in 1833, briefly called Athens, and grew up around the Illinois and Michigan Canal, which began construction in 1836 and opened in 1848.
While digging the canal, workers found an excellent grade of dolomite limestone just beneath the topsoil. The quarries that followed gave Lemont its nickname, the town made of marble, and the pale Joliet-Lemont stone went into the Chicago Water Tower, Holy Name Cathedral and part of the state capitol at Springfield.
Today Lemont is comfortable and green, with a 2020 census population of about 17,800 and a median household income near $126,000. Its fourteen-block downtown historic district, listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2016, still wears that limestone like a memory of the immigrants who quarried it.
How It Became Lithuanian
The Lithuanians did not arrive in Lemont with the canal diggers. They came later, and from a different direction. To understand why, you have to follow them out of the city.
The city years
The first great wave of Lithuanian immigrants reached Chicago before the First World War, drawn to the stockyards, the steel mills and the coal seams of the region. From a few thousand in the 1890s, their numbers swelled toward the eve of the war, and they planted enduring enclaves in Bridgeport, Back of the Yards and Brighton Park. Others followed the coal seams further out, to towns like the Lithuanian mining community of Shenandoah, Pennsylvania.
By the middle of the twentieth century the centre of Lithuanian life had shifted southwest to the Lithuanian enclave of Marquette Park, on the city’s edge. The second wave, the displaced persons who fled Soviet occupation after the Second World War, settled there in numbers, opening taverns, bakeries and parishes where a newcomer could find work, worship and gossip in his own tongue.
That world did not last. Through the 1970s and 1980s, demographic change swept Marquette Park, and the Lithuanian district that had anchored generations slowly dissolved. The families who could move did move, and they moved toward the southwest suburbs: Lemont, Darien, Woodridge, Homer Glen.
The cold morning in 1987
The decisive moment came on a February morning in 1987. Parents dropping their children at the Lithuanian Montessori school Žiburėlis stood talking in a parking lot about a vacant property nearby: the former D’Andreis Seminary, a 125,000 square foot complex on eighteen acres, available for immediate sale.
The need for a Lithuanian centre in the southwest suburbs had been talked about for years. A snowstorm hit that evening, but a group of Lithuanian-Americans met anyway and decided to organise and buy the seminary. They negotiated a purchase price of $800,000, collected enough donations for a down payment and took out a mortgage. By December of 1987, some $300,000 had been contributed by supporters.
So the Lithuanian World Center, Pasaulio Lietuvių Centras, was born in a building that had been training Catholic priests. It opened in 1987 and became, in effect, the new capital of Lithuanian Chicago, transplanted whole into a quiet suburb that most of its members had never heard of a decade earlier.
The third wave
The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 sent a third wave of Lithuanians across the Atlantic, and many of them came straight to Lemont and the towns around it. Lithuania restored its independence, but its economy was raw and uncertain, and the southwest suburbs already had a centre, a school and a church waiting.
This wave was different from the post-war refugees. They were free to travel home, and after Lithuania joined the European Union in 2004, new arrivals to the United States slowed considerably. But by then Lemont was set. The institutions had taken root, and the community had a permanent address.
The Landmarks
Lithuanian World Center, 14911 127th Street. The centre of everything. Inside the former seminary live more than forty Lithuanian organisations, a Roman Catholic chapel, a museum, a gallery and the largest Lithuanian-language school in America. Member groups are said to save hundreds of thousands of dollars a year by sharing the building, and thousands of people pass through its halls annually for craft fairs, dance practices and Christmas celebrations.
Maironis Lithuanian School, at the World Center. Founded in 1959 and now housed in Lemont, Maironis teaches the language, history and culture of Lithuania to roughly seven hundred students who come on Friday evenings and Saturdays. It is, by reputation, the biggest weekend Lithuanian school in the country, the engine that keeps the language alive in a third and fourth generation born in America.
Lithuanian Museum of Art, at the World Center. The museum holds what is often called the finest collection of Lithuanian folk art in America: wood carvings, amber jewellery, traditional national costumes, looms and the verbos woven for Palm Sunday. Its Siela Gallery rotates temporary exhibitions of work by Lithuanian artists from both sides of the ocean.
Matulaitis Mission, at the World Center. The chapel inside the complex serves as the Lithuanian Catholic parish for the southwest suburbs, named for Blessed Jurgis Matulaitis. Here Mass is offered in Lithuanian, and for many older immigrants that hour in their native language is the reason they keep making the drive each week.
Ateitis Foundation Center, 1380 Castlewood Drive. A short distance from the World Center stands the Ateitininkų Namai, a facility built for the Lithuanian Catholic youth movement Ateitis. It hosts camps, retreats and gatherings that pass the movement’s traditions to a new generation growing up in the suburbs.
Lithuanian Research and Studies Center, Lemont. The LRSC acquired a building in Lemont in 2018 and operates several specialist museums, including a Lithuanian military museum, a general history museum and a museum of Lithuanian medicine. It is the scholarly memory of the diaspora, an archive of a nation kept alive in exile.
Old Stone Church, downtown Lemont. Not a Lithuanian landmark, but the oldest church in the village, built of local limestone and now home to the Lemont Area Historical Society and its museum. It is worth knowing because it tells the older story of the town the Lithuanians joined, a place that has welcomed immigrant labour since the canal days.
Where They Came From
The Lithuanians of Lemont carry the layered history of three migrations. The earliest roots reach back to the agricultural villages and small towns of Lithuania under Tsarist rule, the families who first filled Bridgeport and Marquette Park.
The second layer is the post-war diaspora, the displaced persons scattered by Soviet occupation in the 1940s, who arrived having already lost their country once. Many of them, or their children, were the people standing in that parking lot in 1987.
The newest layer came after 1991, from a Lithuania newly independent but economically bruised. They settled across the southwest suburbs, in Lemont, Darien, Homer Glen and Woodridge, towns that often had sizeable Polish communities as well, a familiar neighbour from the old country. The wider southwest corridor had long drawn Eastern European and Mediterranean newcomers, from the Greeks of nearby Palos Hills and Oak Lawn to the Pakistani families who settled around Schaumburg to the northwest.
By 2023, census estimates counted roughly 59,000 people of Lithuanian ancestry across the Chicago metropolitan area, with about 8,500 of them in DuPage County alone. It remains the largest Lithuanian community in the United States and one of the largest anywhere outside Lithuania itself.
Lemont Today
Walk into the Lithuanian World Center on an ordinary weekend and the community looks healthy: children rehearsing folk dances, a craft fair in the hall, the smell of cepelinai somewhere down a corridor. The institutions Lemont built in the late 1980s have outlasted the crisis that created them.
Yet the pressures are real. Lithuania’s EU membership and rising prosperity slowed the flow of new immigrants to a trickle, and the post-war generation that did the founding is passing on. The future of the language and the parish now rests with families who can choose, every Friday night, whether to make the drive.
So far they keep choosing. The Lithuanians in Lemont turned the loss of an urban neighbourhood into something more durable: a centre that any Lithuanian-American, from anywhere, can call home. In a marble town built by one set of immigrants, another set quietly built a capital of their own.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why are there so many Lithuanians in Lemont, Illinois?
The Lithuanians in Lemont, Illinois largely arrived after the historic Marquette Park enclave in Chicago dissolved through the 1970s and 1980s. Families moved to the southwest suburbs, and in 1987 they bought a former seminary in Lemont and turned it into the Lithuanian World Center, which anchored the community there.
What is the Lithuanian World Center?
The Lithuanian World Center, or Pasaulio Lietuvių Centras, is a 125,000 square foot complex at 14911 127th Street in Lemont, a former D’Andreis Seminary bought by Lithuanian-Americans in 1987. It houses more than forty Lithuanian organisations, a school, a museum, a gallery and a Catholic chapel.
Is there a Lithuanian school in Lemont?
Yes. The Maironis Lithuanian School, founded in 1959 and now based at the Lithuanian World Center, teaches roughly seven hundred students on Friday evenings and Saturdays. It is widely described as the largest Lithuanian-language weekend school in the United States.
Can you attend Mass in Lithuanian in Lemont?
Yes. The Matulaitis Mission, the Catholic chapel inside the Lithuanian World Center, serves as the Lithuanian ethnic parish for the southwest suburbs and offers Mass in the Lithuanian language. For many older immigrants it is the heart of community life.
How many Lithuanians live in the Chicago area?
Census estimates from 2023 counted roughly 59,000 people of Lithuanian ancestry across the Chicago metropolitan area, including about 8,500 in DuPage County. It is the largest Lithuanian-American community in the country, and the Lithuanians in Lemont, Illinois form its present-day institutional centre.
What can you see at the Lithuanian Museum of Art in Lemont?
The Lithuanian Museum of Art at the World Center holds one of the finest collections of Lithuanian folk art in America, including wood carvings, amber jewellery, national costumes and traditional looms. Its Siela Gallery also rotates temporary exhibitions by Lithuanian artists.
If your family’s story passed through Lemont, or any of the places Lithuanians have made home in America, Atlas of Home can trace that journey. From the villages of Lithuania and the lost streets of Marquette Park to a former seminary on 127th Street, to wherever you are now.