Homes for sale in
Lake Forest.

Lake Forest traces its founding to February 1856, when a group of Chicago Presbyterians met at the Second Presbyterian Church and formed the Lake Forest Association to establish a town and a Christian college roughly halfway between Evanston and Waukegan. The Association hired St. Louis landscape architect Almerin Hotchkiss, who registered his plat in July 1857. Hotchkiss laid out curvilinear streets following the wooded ravines that drain to Lake Michigan, with parkland, a cemetery, and a town center adjacent to the commuter rail line to Chicago. The plan predated Olmsted and Vaux's Riverside design by more than a decade and is considered one of the earliest examples of romantic, anti-urban suburban planning in America. The Illinois State Legislature granted Lake Forest a special charter and the city was incorporated in 1861.

The college at the heart of the plan opened in 1857 as Lind University, was renamed Lake Forest University in 1865, and narrowed its focus to undergraduate liberal arts as Lake Forest College. The city's defining commercial landmark, Market Square, was built to Howard Van Doren Shaw's U-shaped design between 1915 and 1916, making it one of the first planned shopping districts in the United States, with unified architecture, central management, and dedicated automobile parking. Through the late 19th and 20th centuries, Lake Forest became a country-estate retreat for Chicago industrialists, and the city's bluff-top mansions, ravine landscapes, and Howard Van Doren Shaw buildings remain a defining feature of the community.