C. Frederick Childs: Expert of Monetary Policy

Born in Brattleboro, Vermont, Charles Frederick Childs graduated from Yale in 1899 and met his future wife Edith Newell on a boat trip around the world. The two were married in 1900, making their home...

Clayton Mark and Family

Born in Pennsylvania in 1858, Clayton Mark was what people in the 19th century called a self-made man, who, though he had little more than a grade school education, became one of Chicago’s most promin...

Helen Culver: Making Lives More Sound and Wholesome

Helen Culver was Lake Forest’s resident “old lady who rode her bicycle all over town,” coming in from her Waukegan Road estate. Her extraordinary, trailblazing life encompassed education, nursing, bus...

Once upon a golf links: Mason Phelps, Marion Phelps Pawlick and the Phelps Family in Lake Forest

The local story of the Phelps family begins with Mason Phelps. He was born in 1885 in Milwaukee to Elliott Hubbard Phelps and Sarah Mason Phelps. His father, Elliott, was a grain broker who lost heavi...

Peterson Sisters: A Place to Live and Work

The Peterson family emigrated to the U.S. from Sweden in 1888, ultimately making their home in Burlington, Iowa. Their five daughters, Gerda, Ellen, Freda, Naomi, and Ruth, all found their way, one by...

Lake Forest Triples in Size: Everett Annexation, 1926

By the 1920s, country places had succeeded family farms as the dominant feature west of Lake Forest, and the owners began to wonder about the future of their property investments. Who would take care...

Max Cohn's Centrella Food Store

For more than half a century, Max Cohn’s grocery store was a key Lake Forest institution, providing residents with groceries seven days a week, 362 days a year. From 1913 to 1968, his small grocery wa...

Lake Forest Heights: A Development 50 Years in the Making

Lake Forest Heights, between Everett and Old Elm roads west of the Skokie Highway, has spanned the years of subdivision growth in Lake Forest. The development was originally planned by the American Re...

Deerpath Hill Estates: City Beautiful in the Neighborhood

In the 1920s, developer Henry K. Turnbull began to buy properties along Deerpath, just east of Waukegan Road. Among the sellers were the Farrells, original pioneers to the area, and country estate own...

Lake Forest Entertains Royalty: The Crown Prince of Sweden

The Crown Prince Gustavus Adolphus and Princess Louise of Sweden visited Lake Forest on June 25, 1926. The royal party traveled up from Chicago to Great Lakes Naval Station by motor yacht, and then dr...

A Princely Visit: The Prince of Wales Tours Lake Forest, 1924

On October 17, 1924, the Prince of Wales, later Edward VIII, arrived in Lake Forest by train. He was greeted at the station by over one thousand local residents. The Prince (1894-1972) was the guest o...

Ferdinand Berghorn Jr.

The Berghorn family arrived in the United States from Germany in the 1880s; their journey west included stops in New Haven and Cincinnati before settling in Chicago in 1895. Ferdinand Berghorn Sr. was...

The Newell Sisters: A Summer Story

Like for so many, the Newell family story in Lake Forest begins in the summers. The Newells resided in Kenosha, Wisconsin, but by the 1890s they were spending the warmer months in Lake Forest.Gertrude...

Robert L. Chalmers: Gardener on the Thorne Estate

Robert Lamont Chalmers was born in Rattray, Scotland in 1884. Jean Brown Lindsey was born in Ayrshire, Scotland in 1895. The two met and married in the U.S.

Joseph Fleming: Climbing the Ladder

Joseph Barclay Fleming was from Kilwinning, Scotland. His father Robert Archibald brought the young family to the Braidwood, Illinois area, where Robert worked as a coal miner. After a mine collapse,...

Map: Lake Forest, Lake Bluff and environs, 1922

Lake Forest and Lake Bluff at the height of the estate era in the 1920s. At the time, the western city limits of Lake Forest only extended to the future site of the Skokie Highway in the north, and to...

The Knauz Family: Bringing the Entrepreneurial Spirit to Lake Forest and Lake Bluff

Though their families lived within six miles of each other in rural Germany, Karl Knauz and Emmy Becker first met in the large German-American community in Kenosha, Wisconsin. They had immigrated (ind...

Elsa and A. Watson Armour Family: Elawa and Beyond

As you know, the Armour family has a deep connection to Chicago as one of the city’s foremost pioneers of industry. Several members of the family have been residents of Lake Forest.

Foster-Stirling Family

William Stirling was born in Stirlingshire, Scotland in 1851. The house where he grew up, which you can see pictured here in a more recent photo, was called Kippenross. He came to the U.S. in 1879 and...

Beye-Rickhoff-Witberg-Stein Family

John and Jennie Beye came to the U.S. from Rotterdam in 1905. They likely ended up in Lake Forest because Jennie’s sister Cornelia and her husband Derk Bennes were here – Derk Jr. became a Lake Forest...

Farming from Scotland to Lake Forest: Sneddon-Larsen Family

Charles Anton Larsen and Annie Jensen both immigrated to the U.S. from Denmark, initially settling in Wisconsin, where they married in 1895. By 1900, they were living in Lake Forest, on Depot Avenue,...

Growing with Lake Forest: The Cascarano Family

For generations, the Cascaranos had lived in the Valenzano province of Bari, Italy, located in the southeast along the coast, about 250 miles from Rome. In 1896, a young tree trimmer named Antonio Cas...

Leaving a Legacy: The Dick Family

Adam Dick and Rebecca Wible both hailed from Westmoreland County, Pennsylvania, but they married in Quincy, Illinois, after migrating to help start a new church congregation there. They settled in Gal...

Berghorn-Peterson Family

The Berghorn-Peterson family’s Lake Forest story begins around 1907, with the arrival in town of the Peterson sisters. The Peterson family had emigrated to the U.S. from Sweden in 1888, ultimately mak...

Childs-McBride-Greene Family

The Childs-McBride-Greene story begins with summers in Lake Forest. The Newell family resided in Kenosha, Wisconsin, but by the 1890s they were spending the warmer months in Lake Forest. The family nu...

Sloan’s Repair Shop and the Sloan Family

Location: Bank Lane between Deerpath and Illinois

Clifford and Mollie Sloan moved to Lake Forest between 1904 and 1910, residing in the community for nearly 30 years. Both born in Georgia, they were married in Chicago in 1904. Clifford M. Sloan...

Lawson-Jordan Family

The Lawson-Jordan family was honored as a Centennial Family by the History Center in 2022. The following is taken from the presentation for that award. 

Peter and Anna Williams

Peter Williams (1834-1917) was one of the earliest African Americans to settle in Lake Forest, coming north from enslavement in Alabama. He described his life experiences in an 1896 program at the Fir...

Ginevra King: Not Just Gatsby's Girl

Though the rest of the world may conflate Ginevra King with the romantic heroines of her one-time beau, author F. Scott Fitzgerald, Lake Forest knew her as one of its own. She grew up spending summers...

John Griffith: Developing Lake Forest

John Griffith opened his Lake Forest business in 1903 which grew to include real estate, insurance and mortgages. Born in North Wales, he came to Chicago in 1888 and within five years was in Lake Fore...

Map: Lake Forest, 1881

Many streets in Lake Forest changed their names in the 1910s.Depot Avenue --> McKinley AvenueHazel Avenue --> Church StreetLinden Avenue --> College RoadPoplar Avenue --> Rosemary RoadMapl...

Market Square: Heralding a New Era in Urban Planning

At its beginnings, Market Square broke new ground. In 1916, as the nation’s first artfully designed shopping center, it linked pedestrian, automobile, and train, and heralded a new era in urban planni...

Alfred Hoyt Granger: Architect Extraordinaire

Educated at Kenyon College, Massachusetts Institute of Technology and eventually the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris, Alfred Granger came to Chicago to assist architect Charles Coolidge on the design of...

Lake Forest Legacy: Joseph Hairston

Joseph Hairston (1887-1959) was born in Virginia and moved to Lake Forest sometime before 1910. He initially worked as a laborer before serving in World War I. Following his service, Joseph began work...

Paving the Way in Lake Forest: The Kelley Family

The Kelley family's presence in Lake Forest owes much to the livestock concerns of James Anderson and George Findlay. In 1878, they imported the first lot of Aberdeen angus cattle to the U.S. Accompan...