The Chicago Fire and the Estate Era
Near Lake Geneva, Wisconsin
In October of eighteen seventy-one, the Great Chicago Fire destroyed more than seventeen thousand buildings and left three hundred people dead and a third of the city homeless. Wealthy Chicagoans who had summer properties on Geneva Lake retreated to them while Chicago rebuilt. The crisis accelerated what was already an established pattern: the city's most prosperous families using the lakefront as a counterweight to the heat, the noise, and the smell of an industrial city.
By the eighteen nineties the lake's shores were packed with elaborate summer residences. The families who built them were the manufacturers and merchants who had made Chicago the capital of the industrial Midwest. William Wrigley built here.
The Schwinn bicycle family built here. Swift of the meatpacking dynasty built here. A property called Black Point was built in eighteen eighty-eight as a summer retreat for Chicago beer baron Conrad Seipp, its Queen Anne cottage sitting on lakefront grounds.
Black Point passed through several owners and is now maintained by the Wisconsin Historical Society, open for tours in season and accessible by boat as the family and their guests always arrived. The estate era is gone in the sense that nobody is building new Gilded Age mansions on the lake today. But many of the buildings survive, and the Shore Path puts them within arm's reach of anyone who wants to see what a century of Chicago industrial wealth looked like when it went on vacation.
