Homes for sale in
Round Lake.

Round Lake takes its name from the roughly circular 227-acre lake that anchored the area's earliest settlement in the mid-19th century. The Lake, Cook, and McHenry Counties Railway Company was chartered in 1899 to build a branch of the Chicago, Milwaukee and St. Paul Railroad from Libertyville to Janesville, Wisconsin. Railroad officials first eyed Hainesville for a depot, but negotiations failed, and Amarias M. White convinced them to locate the station in Round Lake instead, donating the land for the depot. The line was deeded on July 1, 1901, and Round Lake formally incorporated on January 7, 1909, with White as its first village president.

For most of the 20th century, Round Lake remained a small rail-stop village surrounded by farms and the broader resort culture of the four Round Lake communities. The modern era began with the 1990s housing boom, when subdivision development along the Rollins Road and Cedar Lake Road corridors transformed the village. Between 2000 and 2010, the population grew 213 percent from 5,842 to 18,289, before leveling at 18,721 in the 2020 census. Today the village is pursuing an $18.8 million downtown realignment of Cedar Lake Road through its historic core, where eight properties are eligible for the National Register of Historic Places.