Lake Forest College

Lake Forest College was founded in 1857 by Reverend Robert W. Patterson as a Presbyterian alternative to the Methodist Northwestern University in Evanston. It was originally named Lind University after Sylvester Lind, who had pledged $80,000 to launch the school. Patterson and his fellow Chicago Presbyterians formed the Lake Forest Association (led by Hiram F. Mather) to establish the town of Lake Forest and the university roughly halfway between Evanston and Waukegan two years after the Chicago and Milwaukee Railway began service from Chicago. They hired St. Louis landscape architect Almerin Hotchkiss to design the town of Lake Forest with a university park at its center. Hotchkiss used the area's wooded ravines and forest as guidelines to design the town.

Lake Forest Academy, a boys' preparatory school, began offering classes in 1858; collegiate-level courses began in 1860. By the mid-1860s, a small New England–style village had been established with an academy building, a Presbyterian church, and several homes. The school had a medical college (Lind Medical School) from 1859 to 1863, which later became independent and eventually became part of Northwestern University, now known as the Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine.

In 1865, the name became Lake Forest University. In 1869 Ferry Hall, a girls' preparatory school and junior college, opened as a division of the university led by Fannie Ruth Robinson. It later merged with Lake Forest Academy in 1974.

In 1876 Mary Eveline Smith Farwell started Lake Forest College, a coeducational division of the university, under the leadership of the Reverend Patterson. In 1878, College Hall (now Brown Hall) was built following a fire that destroyed the former hotel being used for classes.

James Gore King McClure arrived in Lake Forest in 1881 as the pastor of the Presbyterian Church. Under his influence over the next 50 years, the college experienced a large transition "from a pluralistic graduate and professional emphasis to a singular undergraduate liberal arts focus," says former Lake Forest College archivist Art Miller (1996–2013), who co-wrote the 2000 book 30 Miles North: A History of Lake Forest College, Its Town, and Its City of Chicago.

In summer of 1887 Rush Medical College became the medical department of Lake Forest University; this relationship was dissolved in 1898 when Rush affiliated with the University of Chicago. Also in 1887 Lake Forest established a relationship with the Northwestern College of Dental Surgery (shortly thereafter known as the Chicago College of Dental Surgery), Chicago's first dental school, to serve as its dental department. In 1889 the Chicago College of Law became the legal department of the university. Lake Forest's affiliation with the Chicago College of Dental Surgery and the Chicago-Kent College of Law was ended in 1902 following a 1901 vote by the board of trustees to divest entirely of the professional schools.

The Lake Forest School of Music opened in 1916, affiliated with Ferry Hall until 1918 when it became an independent division of the university. The School of Music incorporated and extended the courses in music hitherto given in other departments, offering a four-year course of study leading to a degree of Bachelor of Music, and was directed by Marta Milinowski, who went on to be Professor of Music at Vassar College from 1930 to 1950. The School of Music operated through 1922; in 1928 a department of music was established at Lake Forest College. A Summer School of Landscape Architecture was opened in Summer 1916 in cooperation with the University of Illinois following interest and support from the Garden Club of Lake Forest and trustees of both institutions; the Summer School was directed by Ralph R. Root, Professor of Landscape Architecture at the University of Illinois. It ceased to exist after 1919 due to low enrollment, but a later iteration, the Foundation for Architecture and Landscape Architecture, offered summer courses on the Lake Forest College campus from 1926 to 1931.

In June, 1925, the Lake Forest University Trustees sold the two preparatory schools Lake Forest Academy and Ferry Hall, and the school's focus was narrowed to undergraduate liberal arts at Lake Forest College.