Lake Geneva: Chicago's Summer Escape
Near Lake Geneva, Wisconsin
After the Great Chicago Fire of eighteen seventy-one, the city's wealthiest families needed somewhere safe to store their money and their summers. They found it about seventy-five miles northwest in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin. Chewing gum king William Wrigley built here.
Bicycle baron Ignatz Schwinn built here. Washing-machine maker F. L.
Maytag built here. Wives and children summered on the lake while husbands shuttled back and forth by train from the city. Locals called it the Newport of the West.
Grand estates lined the shoreline, each one meant to outdo the last. The railroad connection made it a weekly commute rather than a journey. The estates are still there, most of them, walled off along the lakeshore, outlasting the fortunes and the families that built them.
