Sylvester Lind: Founder and Four-Time Mayor
Sylvester Lind (1808-1892).
Sylvester Lind was a Scottish immigrant who came to Chicago in 1837, in the early days before it was a big city, and found work as a carpenter. He eventually had his own business in Chicago selling lumber, or wood, which was of course in high demand for all the new buildings being built there.
By the early 1850s Lind built a big building in what is now downtown Chicago known as the Lind Block. At seven stories, it was one of the first Chicago “skyscrapers,” and one of the only downtown structures to survive the Chicago Fire in 1871.
Lind Block, late 1800s - then occupied by Fuller and Fuller Wholesale Druggists. The building was taken down in the early 1960s.
Sylvester Lind often traveled all the way up from Chicago to Green Bay, Wisconsin, for his business, and before the railroad went in, how do you think he got there? Often on horseback. He had ridden through this area where Lake Forest is today and was one of the people to suggest the site for the new town in the late 1850s.
One of our town’s schools was almost named “Lind University” for him instead. He wanted to give a big donation of money to help start the school. Unfortunately, before he could fulfill his promise, he lost a lot of his fortune as the economy changed and some of his investments were losses. So they named the college after the town instead - what we now know as Lake Forest College.
Lind University advertisement in the classified section of the Chicago Tribune.
But Sylvester Lind gave to the new community in many other ways. He served as mayor of Lake Forest four different times! Also, he was involved in something else very important. How many of you have heard of the Underground Railroad? Who can tell me what that was?
Well, Sylvester Lind, like many Lake Forest founders, was against enslavement. He arranged that the ships that his lumber company used to transport wood across the Great Lakes could also be secretly used by Black Americans who had escaped enslavement in the South to transport themselves to places where they could live freely - in Canada or northern parts of the United States.
Sylvester and Eliza Lind’s home in Lake Forest was built in 1859 on Deerpath just down the street from where our museum is now, and one of Lake Forest’s first residences. Unfortunately their house is no longer there - the house pictured below, which is still there, was built on the same spot as the older Lind house.
In 1905, the original Lind home burned. Subsequent owners Charles Dyer and Katherine Garrison Norton rebuilt it on the original foundations, with architect Hugh M. G. Garden designing the new residence.