Lake Geneva: The Newport of the West
Near Lake Geneva, Wisconsin
An hour and a half north of Chicago, past the suburbs and the cornfields, Geneva Lake appears without warning: a deep blue oval of water, more than a hundred feet deep in places, remarkably clear, set in a landscape of rolling glaciated hills. The city of Lake Geneva sits at the northeastern corner of the lake, which goes by the slightly different name of Geneva Lake, a distinction that confuses first-time visitors and delights the locals. The lake was formed ten thousand years ago when the last of the great ice sheets retreated and left a basin carved in the bedrock, fed by meltwater and eventually spring-fed streams.
The Potawatomi called the lake Kishwauketoe, meaning clear water. Settlers later called it Big Foot Lake, after a Potawatomi leader known as Mauk-suck, whose band lived along its shores before the forced removals of the eighteen thirties. In the eighteen thirties a government surveyor, John Brink, renamed it Geneva, after Geneva, New York, which he thought it resembled.
Chicago money found Geneva Lake early and came in waves. The great fire of eighteen seventy-one, which destroyed more than seventeen thousand buildings and left more than a quarter of Chicago's population homeless, accelerated what was already a migration in progress: wealthy families retreating to their summer estates while the city rebuilt. By the turn of the twentieth century the lake's shores were lined with the mansions of the Gilded Age economy.
Chewing gum magnate William Wrigley, bicycle maker Ignatz Schwinn, washing machine pioneer F. L. Maytag, and dozens of other industrialists built elaborate summer retreats on the lakefront.
The place became known as the Newport of the West. The twentieth century added stranger chapters: a world-class astronomical observatory built by a Chicago streetcar baron, a game designer working in a modest downtown house who invented an entirely new form of play, and Hugh Hefner arriving by helicopter for the groundbreaking of a Playboy resort. Geneva Lake holds all of it, still clear, still deep, still beautiful.
