Lake Forest: Potawatomi Bluffs to Presbyterian Suburb

Potawatomi people fished the Lake Michigan shore here for generations, their villages perched on the same high bluffs that would make this land irresistible to a different kind of settler. The eighteen thirty-three Treaty of Chicago stripped their title and forced them west. Soon after, the first American farm families moved in.

Two decades later, a group of Presbyterian ministers saw those same bluffs and decided this was exactly where a university town should be. In eighteen fifty-seven, landscape architect Almerin Hotchkiss platted Lake Forest around the new college, his curving roads following the natural ravines rather than the grid that ruled most of Illinois. A commuter rail line put Chicago within about an hour, and the wealthy followed.

Lake Forest became the prototype of the railroad suburb, the picturesque opposite of the city grid, proof that if you placed trees in the right places, money would come to them.