Commonwealth Edison magnate Samuel Insull was an idea man, and an expert at combining two good ideas into one great one. One might have assumed that his notion of pairing two of the great passions of the 1920s— golf and flying—into one venture, would be similarly successful. But it did not turn out the way he hoped.

In 1928, Insull and a syndicate of 26 Chicago businessmen purchased 846 acres from Mrs. J. Ogden Armour for $2.6 million. They planned to turn the site of Armour’s former estate, Mellody Farm—which, forebodingly, had already witnessed one devastating financial reversal—into an aviation country club, an executive fly-in golf club with a national membership of millionaires.

According to newspaper accounts, in autumn 1929, the course and its accompanying airfield had been partially laid out, and “a locker house, to cost $100,000 and to connect with the mansion by pergola, was partly constructed.” In one of Lake Forest’s first signals of a Depression-era economy, by 1930 workmen had abandoned the half-finished locker wing, never to return.

The two news articles (pictured) from the Lake Forester, from the summer of 1929 and the summer of 1932, document the rise and fall of the Mellody Farm Country Club.