Mayslake Peabody Estate, Oak Brook

Just off the highway in Oak Brook stands one of the Chicago suburbs' most improbable monuments to ambition and irony. Mayslake Hall is a thirty-nine-room Tudor Revival mansion completed in nineteen twenty-one for Francis Stuyvesant Peabody, one of the wealthiest coal magnates in the United States and the man who would become the founder of what is now the largest private-sector coal company in the world.

Peabody built his fortune the hard way, starting his own coal company in eighteen eighty-three and growing it into an empire that powered Chicago's factories and heated its homes. By the time he was ready to retire he had amassed an eight-hundred-and-forty-eight-acre estate in the western suburbs. He named it Mayslake after his first wife, May, and their daughter, also May. He hired the celebrated Chicago architectural firm of Marshall and Fox to design the mansion, the same firm responsible for the Blackstone Hotel and the Drake Hotel downtown. The finished building cost seven hundred and fifty thousand dollars, a staggering sum at the time.

Then, with almost theatrical timing, fate intervened. Peabody had been in his dream home for barely nine months when he suffered a heart attack while riding his horse across his own property. He died in nineteen twenty-two at sixty-three, having hardly had a chance to enjoy what he had spent a lifetime building.

His family sold the estate shortly after his death. In nineteen twenty-four the Franciscan Order of Friars Minor purchased it for four hundred and fifty thousand dollars, well below the asking price, and converted it into a spiritual retreat center. The Franciscans held it for decades before leaving in nineteen ninety-one.

Today the Forest Preserve District of DuPage County owns the property and maintains it as a public cultural site. The grounds are open for hiking and events, and Mayslake Hall hosts concerts, theater, and exhibitions. The formal gardens and the small private chapel Peabody built for his estate still stand, giving visitors a glimpse of Gilded Age wealth that lasted less than a year before the man who built it was gone.