See how Lake Forest's downtown and Central Business District have been the heart of the community for over 150 years. Lake Forest is a picturesque city built on the shores of Lake Michigan and has been home to Chicago's capitalist families, who developed estates around beautiful Lake Forest College. For over 150 years, the Lake Forest Central Business District has been the heart of the community. Now, you can see for yourself why that is thanks to never-before published photographs from personal collections, the estate of Griffith, Grant and Lackie, the City of Lake Forest and others.
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.
West Lake Forest has had a shifting boundary since the 1850s. By 1926, Lake Forest had grown to encompass the farm community of Everett, five miles southwest of the lakeside commuter suburb. Since then, Lake Forest has annexed most of the former farm and estate land west to the Tri-State Tollway (I-94). Now, West Lake Forest denotes an expansive, low-density suburban area of mostly newer housing and businesses. Its eastern limit is cited variously as the Skokie River, Route 41, and Waukegan Road. Within this area of pioneer farms, fox-hunt territory, estate district, and series of suburban neighborhoods are stories of new arrivals living the "American Dream." This book attempts to share the stories of these pioneering men and women.
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