Lake Forest

Estates, People, and Culture

Arthur H. Miller, Shirley M. Paddock

• Publisher: Arcadia Publishing
• Year: 2000
• ISBN:
  9781439611050
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

Lake Forest: Estates, People, and Culture is the first book-scaled historical survey entirely focused on this notable Chicago North Shore suburb in a generation, offering a newly visual approach to the community's unique early past. Many of the nearly 200 images have never been published, having been newly discovered in local archives and family collections. From the Civil War to World War I especially, this community of millionaires flourished, giving rise to a diverse whole town-within-a-town whose local industry comprised the estates and their owners. West Lake Forest had been settled by Irish-descendant farmers after 1836, but by 1857 a new sort of community had sprung up further east, between the then-new railroad line along the lake and the shore. It was a wooded, naturalistic, anti-urban suburb, centered on education and faith, established by New England descendant Chicago Presbyterians, and businessmen with their families.

Four

THE GREAT ESTATE ERA 1897–1917

Landscape architect and historian Norman Newton coined the term Country Place Era in his 1972 history entitled Design on the Land (M.I.T. Press), describing the period of estate building between the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition at Chicago and 1933, when Franklin Delano Roosevelt was elected president, ushering in changes unfavorable to large private properties. This phase, though somewhat muted locally after the 1929 stock market crash, continued in town up to the beginning of World War II in 1942. However, some such local ventures, perhaps the grandest in scale and complexity and also reflecting some of the greatest Chicago and U.S. fortunes, came in the decade prior to this country’s entry into World War I and also to the Russian Revolution, both in 1917. Another phase of Lake Forest estate building reached a peak between 1924 and 1934, following a post-war Depression, but this later period can be included, perhaps, in a future volume.

This album’s high point occurs in the early twentieth century, when Edith Rockefeller McCormick, daughter of John D. Rockefeller, who then was the richest American, and J. Ogden Armour, who in this period was the second richest American, were building their great Lake Forest estates. By 1923, Armour’s fortune was gone, and by the early 1930s, so was Edith’s. Also, it was in this pre-World War I phase that F. Scott Fitzgerald was smitten, futilely, with Ginevra King; the image of Lake Forest he perpetuated was formed for him in that pre-war moment. Finally, when the Garden Club of America, which had been founded in 1913, visited the local Garden Club in 1919, now the Lake Forest Garden Club, they were dazzled by the beauty and concentration here of the garden arts—in effect the pre-war accomplishment. This experience is recalled in a little book of plans done by landscape architect Ralph Rodney Root for the local club to hand out to the 1919 visitors. Root also published an article in January of 1924, in The Architectural Record including many of these plans. It is this largely pre-war project, for the visit had been proposed earlier, which convinced the East Coast estate establishment that the locals excelled not just in wealth, but in style as well.

The Onwentsia Club, starting in 1896, drew more and more of the Chicago social elite into an orbit not unlike that of Versailles in the era of the Sun King. The classic annual fete of the early 1900s was the horse show, where all ages paraded and competed, and where everyone came to see and be seen. Here steel baron Edward L. Ryerson looks on at the front of the group on the right, watching the two competing horsemen. (Paddock.)

Looking toward the former Cobb house, now the clubhouse, from the west end of the Onwentsia grounds, this photographer has captured the afternoon polo match in progress at full pitch close to the clubhouse. Visible, too, on the right or to the south of the clubhouse, were two buildings (demolished) with apartments to house Chicago-based members out for the weekend. (Archer/Paddock/TG.)

Polo had been introduced in 1896, Onwentsia’s first season. In charge of the polo ponies was Swedish-born Gus Malmquist. Here he is pictured on the left in a derby hat, leading stable personnel in a practice drill for the ponies. Arpee (144–45) credits Malmquist with bringing “the first polo ponies to Lake Forest.” Malmquist visited the Dakotas and Montana to find and ship back his stock. (Weber.)

The third in this trio of British aristocratic sports—with golf and polo—was fox-hunting, and the club’s hunt before World War I ranged west as far as the Des Plaines River. Here the club hunt gathered in front of Westmoreland (architect James Gamble Rogers, 1903; demolished), the home of A.B. Dick, the entrepreneur for the first duplicator, and his family. (Coll./TG.)

The community’s first hospital, operated by the Lake Forest Hospital Association, the Alice Home on Lake Forest College’s North Campus, was a gift in 1899 of the Henry C. Durand family, who had given the institute (1892) as well; it was named in memory of Mrs. Durand’s sister, Alice Burhans. The architects were Frost & Granger. After 1940, the building became Alice Lodge, a women’s residence for the college until the 1960s, when it was torn down. Its foundations can still be seen on the east side of the campus, on the ravine edge. (Coll.)

Today’s South Park became the site of the Contagious ...