Legendary Locals of Lake Forest

By Susan L. Kelsey and Arthur H. Miller

Since the 1850s, Lake Forest, located 30 miles north of Chicago on Lake Michigan, has been a distinctive suburb. It has been a retreat from the diseases, public accessibility, rougher elements, soot, stockyard smells, and general density of bustling city life. For at least five generations, it has been the retreat for Chicago's leading New England-descended families, such as the Farwells, Swifts, and Armours. And for over 150 years, Lake Forest has been the home for a community of educators, merchants, artisans, designers, and a wide variety of estate specialists, the latter from pre-Civil War escaped slaves and Scots and Irish immigrants to today's notable garden and interior artists. Legendary Locals of Lake Forest draws on rare archival images from local and Chicago public and private sources.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Legendary Locals
• Release date: Nov 30, 2015
• ISBN: 9781439654002

Susan L. Kelsey

In Downtown Lake Forest, Susan L. Kelsey and Shirley M. Paddock have assembled never-before-published photographs from personal collections, the estate of Griffith, Grant and Lackie, the City of Lake Forest, and others.

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stories.

INTRODUCTION

Since the late 1980s, with the appearance of Susan Dart’s Market Square (1984), several books about Lake Forest have been published, mostly about places and buildings, even when they are also about persons. For example, Virginia A. Greene’s The Architecture of Howard Van Doren Shaw (1998) is about the homes and buildings Shaw built, as was Susan Dart’s book about Market Square, which included Shaw biographical material. But relatively little focus has been on the people of Lake Forest. This little book aims to address that need for primary attention on persons and their stories, at least with thumbnail biographies. The subjects of these are referenced in the index.

Legendary Locals of Lake Forest is one in a series by Arcadia Publishing. Lake Forest has been the subject of several Arcadia titles: Lake Forest: Estates, People, and Culture by Shirley M. Paddock and Arthur H. Miller (2000; LFEPC when cited); Lake Forest Day: 100 Years of Celebration by the Lake Forest–Lake Bluff Historical Society (2008; LFD); Downtown Lake Forest by Susan Kelsey and Shirley Paddock (2009; DLF); and West Lake Forest by Susan Kelsey, Arthur H. Miller, and Shirley Paddock (2012; WLF). Images and/ or biographical information about locals appear in several other books of the period, some mentioned in the bibliography. So when people are referred to but not shown or discussed in detail, they may be referenced to these sources with these acronyms.

A Chicago leadership suburb since 1859, Lake Forest has been a resort and home to many notable people. Even those for whom images are available in the aggregate vastly overwhelm the scale of this modest project. Legendary Locals of Lake Forest was undertaken with two main goals: to provide new information and images for the most part not seen in recent books about the town or about Chicago; and to illustrate a range across time, genders, ethnic backgrounds, and stations in life. Profiled here are Chicago leaders and local townspeople—from business owners and professionals to employees and specialized staff on estates. Many, if not most, of the people featured here are not the focus of coverage elsewhere.

Since 2000, there has been much new research and writing on Lake Forest and its surrounding area, as new attention has been given to this community’s position in the Chicago area, just as Chicago itself has been unique in the midcontinental region. A suburban retreat for wealthy Chicagoans since its inception, Lake Forest has been the home and/or seasonal resort for early business founders and their descendants. St. Louis landscape designer Almerin Hotchkiss’s 1857 plan for the railroad suburb, east of the tracks leading south to the city 30 miles distant, essentially called for a gated community, with streets converging at the train station. Whether to confuse antebellum slave catchers or to discourage casually visiting, perhaps jealous, pioneer Chicagoans, the town since its founding has cultivated an aura of physical impenetrability, with winding streets, long driveways, and restrained signage. The Internet, of course, has ripped away this veil of secrecy. In the past three decades, many new families with resources have joined not only the tax rolls but also the exclusive club registers and benefit invitation lists, as the eternal procession continues: the old money assimilating the new by transmitting its arcane ways in order to incorporate new resources and preserve standards. This book will try to reflect both lasting dynasties and the first flowering of new ones.

Since the beginning, specialists have had to cater to the needs of those with uncommon resources and complex residential establishments. At the outset, these workers were newly liberated plantation workers, illegals at the time, who could not read or write but knew how to cook elaborate dishes, sew elegant gowns, handle fancy horses and carriages, tend to fine gardens, and generally attend to the elite. This community, joined by returnees from Canada after the Civil War, made up a large segment of the town into the 20th century. Some estate workers also came from Ireland. Most were quick to learn and accustomed to hard work for long hours. Others who had worked in gardens in cold and windy conditions, such as Scotland, Cornwall, Scandinavia, and Switzerland, breathed life into the narrow plant palette in the region, which saw extremes of cold winters and hot, dry summers. By the 20th century, a second wave of specialists was needed to staff new seasonal estates around the Onwentsia Club. The first wave had been centered on schools, the college, and year-round residents. After 1930, staffs shrank with the general economic downturn. Old retainers became experts in many fields, people who could drive, be handy, and garden—or, in the case of women, cook, launder, and clean. This only made the work more demanding and more valued by their grateful employers. Many of the descendants of these support-community specialists stay in touch with Lake Foresters, and a few still live in or near Lake Forest.

This book’s thumbnail portraits aim to tell the story of these diverse and specialized individuals, who have lived together here at one time or another, at least for the first century or so of the town’s history. Today, many who support these residential establishments live elsewhere, and former townspeople’s neighborhoods have been gentrified for professional and managerial families—including families of East and South Asian origins.

Lake Forest stands as a distinct culture, given its atypical local heritage and the larger-than-life stories of notable financial and industrial leaders, scholars, artists, philanthropists, media pioneers, and even an Olympic swimmer. This culture has been nurtured by over a century and a half of midcontinental innovation in many areas, from business to the arts, from social betterment to individual and team achievement. Its early-20th-century story was epitomized in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, set on the East Coast but derived from personalities and situations found on the upper North Shore of Chicago. Local architecture and garden design have set the pace for over a century in the United States and beyond, making waves as well at London’s Chelsea Flower Show. In education, Lake Forest has nurtured achievement, its alumni helping to mold Chicago as did Lake Forest Academy graduate Clyde Carr, who, with Charles D. Norton, Edward H. Bennett, T.E. Donnelley, and Evanston’s Daniel Burnham, conceived, created, and implemented the 1909 Plan of Chicago.

Lake Forest remains unique, and the stories of those who have been notable deserve to be known better locally, within the larger Chicago area, and beyond. Its leaders in so many fields continue to shape the world around them and to maintain their town as a singularly special place.

CHAPTER ONE

Chicago Business Leaders

The first chapter of this book offers profiles of Chicago train-commuting business leaders who have lived in Lake Forest. In the early years, these men of affairs made their homes year-round in Presbyterian Church–centered, dry Lake Forest, and their children attended local schools, away from the dangers and temptations of the city. The early Presbyterian businessmen had been pioneers, most notably D.R. Holt (LFEPC), a New Englander who began in the fur trade at Mackinac and then scouted out and secured a lumber concession at Oconto, Wisconsin, on Green Bay. Based in Chicago, his lumberyard had the first boatload shipped on the Illinois & Michigan Canal, in 1848. By 1860, a family man and strict Presbyterian, Holt wanted his children raised away from the already lurid and menacing city. His wife, Ellen Hubbard, was a sister-in-law of Gurdon Saltonstall Hubbard, also in the fur trade and, in the 1820s and 1830s, a pioneer Chicago businessman. By the late 1860s and early 1870s, the Farwell brothers, John V. and Charles B., of New England descent, had built houses for their young families near each other on East Deerpath Road. In the 1880s, these entrepreneurs traded with the cash-starved state of Texas, giving it a new capitol building in Austin, completed in Vermont marble and with ink in the ink wells, in exchange for three million acres of surplus land in the panhandle of Texas—the legendary XIT Ranch.

In the mid-1890s, a new generation of city businessmen began commuting seasonally, especially on weekends between April and late October. Their Chicago offices closed on Saturday afternoons so that they could get outside and exercise in the fresh air for a half day, playing sports like golf, tennis, and polo. Temperance prevailed, and Sundays continued to be dedicated to quiet Sabbath pursuits, at least until the World War I era. By the 1920s and 1930s, the sporty set was joining the 19th-century families with new homes, often for living in Lake Forest year-round, and lifestyles veered toward the post-Puritan.

After World War II especially, businessmen who moved to Lake Forest built smaller homes, scaled closer to those of the support community neighborhoods, but in new areas—Northmoor, between Sheridan Road and South Park, south of Westleigh Road, and east of the Skokie River; on the Lasker estate in west Lake Forest; and west of Waukegan Road on the north side of the extended Deerpath Road. Also, many more tended to work for Lake County and North Shore corporations—on the south, Allstate and Kraft in the Northbrook area, and on the north, Abbott, Outboard Marine, Motorola, and Johns Manville in the North Chicago and Waukegan area. These middle managers and professionals (the latter especially at Abbott) now drove to work, and the one-car garages of the prewar railroad commuters were replaced by two-car garages; one car was used for commuting to work, the other for driving around town during the day.

What each of these generations of business managers and leaders and their families had in common was extraordinary vision for the possibilities of the Chicago area for growth and prosperity. These visionaries included John V. Farwell, who, in the mid-1850s, built a huge warehouse. He was ridiculed by his commercial peers for taking such a big risk. But only his firm would gather and stage great quantities of uniforms to service the needs of Civil War troops. Marvin Hughitt by the 1870s could project on the Northwest a vast rail network, the Chicago & North Western Railway, which he oversaw until his death in 1928. Banker’s son Byron Laflin