Lake Forest-Lake Bluff History Museum

This property was originally the coach house to the Russell Day Hill and Lucia Green Hill estate at 808 E Deerpath, and is the product of the Chicago office of the Boston architects Shepley Rutan and Coolidge. Hill was a Chicago native, born in 1869. Though he began college at Yale, only one year in Hill was called upon to take his place in his late father’s real estate business, R.D. Hill and Co., a major player in Chicago’s central business district. At the time he built his estate in Lake Forest, Hill was also vice president of the Chicago real estate board.

By the 1940s, this coach house had been subdivided from the main house. Early inhabitants included Miss Florence Bakkers; Mrs. Norma Donges Senn; Dr. Owen G. McDonald; and William D. Fergus.

It is believed that this property was built on the site of the Samuel F. Miller house (1860), one of Lake Forest’s earliest homes. Miller surveyed and supervised the building of the first railroad from Chicago to Milwaukee, which later became the Chicago and North Western Railroad. Miller was the first teacher at Lake Forest Academy, its first headmaster, and Lake Forest’s first postmaster and school superintendent.