Kenilworth: Potawatomi Shore to Joseph Sears's Storybook Village

This bluff above Lake Michigan was Potawatomi and Ottawa land, part of the vast Great Lakes territory the tribes ceded in the eighteen thirty-three Treaty of Chicago, when they gave up five million acres in Illinois, Michigan, and Wisconsin in exchange for land west of the Mississippi. Within a generation the lakeshore was Anglo farmstead.

In eighteen eighty-nine a Chicago businessman named Joseph Sears bought two hundred twenty-three acres here for one hundred fifty thousand dollars, inspired by Sir Walter Scott's novel and the English countryside. He formed the Kenilworth Company, hired architect Franklin Burnham, and platted one of the first fully planned residential communities in the United States. Utilities went underground. No alleys, no fences, no commercial buildings were permitted. Lots were large and oriented for sunlight. The village incorporated in eighteen ninety-six when the population hit three hundred, and architects attending the eighteen ninety-three Columbian Exposition came out to study it as a model.

Kenilworth's deeds began carrying racial and religious restrictions by the nineteen twenties, limiting ownership to Christian Caucasians only. Those covenants were ruled unenforceable in nineteen forty-eight but shaped who lived here for decades.