South Holland

Residential suburb in northeastern Illinois, at the junction of Thorn Creek and the Little Calumet River, 27 km/17 mi south of Chicago; population (1990) 22,100. It manufactures some furniture, boxes, and concrete products.

First settled by Dutch immigrants in 1846, it boomed with the arrival of the Illinois Central Railroad in 1853. Market gardening eventually became the economic mainstay of the community.

South Holland is the setting of Edna Ferber's Pulitzer prize-winning novel So Big (1924). It was here that the federal government brought action to implement school desegregation for the first time outside the South under the 1964 Civil Rights Act.