Lombard’s defining landmark started as one couple’s hobby. After visiting French lilac breeder Victor Lemoine’s gardens in Nancy, France, Colonel William Plum and his wife Helen brought home two cuttings and began building a private collection on their estate. When Colonel Plum died in 1927, the estate — house, gardens, and lilacs — was left to the public. Noted Prairie School landscape architect Jens Jensen then redesigned the grounds, adding his signature “council rings” — circular stone seating with no head of the table, meant to symbolize democratic, egalitarian gathering.
Today Lilacia Park holds more than 200 lilac varieties across 8.5 acres and was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 2019. Each May, the village has celebrated it with “Lilac Time in Lombard” — a festival and parade running continuously since 1930. A few blocks away stands Lombard’s oldest home, the 1830s Sheldon Peck Homestead: abolitionist Sheldon Peck used the house as an Underground Railroad station, reportedly hiding as many as seven people seeking freedom at once — a history formally recognized by the National Park Service’s Network to Freedom in 2011.
