O'Hare International Airport's three-letter airport code—ORD—is a relic of the area's origins as a community called Orchard Place. Nestled in the middle of the airport—tucked amid two runways and a FedEx processing center—is a 1½-acre rectangle of land that is one of the last physical remnants of the area around this settlement: Resthaven Cemetery. The burial ground holds the graves of about 150 people, the oldest of whom represent some of the German settlers who first came to this area west of Chicago in the 1830s and 1840s.

This area around Resthaven remained a largely agricultural community until World War II, when the U.S. government claimed the land for a Douglas Aircraft Company production facility and airport. Orchard Place became Orchard Field—it was renamed after Naval flying ace Butch O'Hare in 1949—and over the ensuing years, the airport has expanded around Resthaven and become one of the busiest in the world.

Resthaven is the last remaining of at least three burial grounds that were located on the grounds of what today is O'Hare Airport. A small one on the eastern edge, called Wilmer's Old Settler Cemetery, was seized by the federal government in the 1950s and the remains there (which included an unknown number of Native Americans) were moved elsewhere. Another cemetery, St. Johannes (or St. John's), had originally been located next to its namesake church, north of Resthaven on the road that now ends next to the cemetery. The church itself was removed during an earlier O'Hare expansion, but the cemetery had survived until 2012, when it was finally taken out to make way for a runway expansion. The City of Chicago spent $17 million to exhume the cemetery's nearly 1,500 bodies and place them in new locations.

Yet today, Resthaven still remains in the midst of one of the world's busiest airports as one of Chicago's most remote and peculiar historical landmarks.