Originally, the city's main thoroughfare of Bridge Street was designed for horse-drawn carriages and pedestrians.

As time passed, Hydraulic Street, which runs parallel to the Fox River, boasted a trolley that ran from Ottawa to Aurora.

Many of the city's remaining historic single-family homes are within walking distance of Bridge Street, the courthouse and Union Hall.

Earl Adams was the first to settle what would become Yorkville when he built his cabin on Courthouse Hill on the south side of town in 1833.

After a 13-year period in which Oswego claimed that honor, voters chose to relocate the county government in 1859 to Yorkville, a more central location.

Replaced in 1997 with a courthouse on the city's north side, the 1864 building is used by the Kendall County Forest Preserve and other organizations.

It was in that same year high school classes began in the downtown area at the northeast corner of Van Emmon and Bridge Streets.

Due to rising enrollment in the early 1970s, the school was reopened and renamed as Parkview Christian Academy.

Yorkville is in northern Kendall County and is bordered to the northeast by Montgomery, to the east by Oswego, and to the west by Plano.

[23][24] It is the only whitewater park of its kind in Illinois, similar to East Race in South Bend, Indiana.

Additionally, a small portion of Yorkville attends Oswego Community Unit School District 308.

[27] In August 2011, the movie Man of Steel was filmed at a house built specifically for the set in Yorkville.