Market Square: "Here's Spirit of Old Lake Forest"

              Here’s spirit of old Lake Forest

It isn’t unusual these days for a bank to offer gifts to people for using their facility for depositing their money.  These gifts run the gambit from tennis rackets and pots and pans to china and sterling silver.  Usually anyone can pick up free a book of matches, a pen or a nice calendar at Christmas time.  It’s good advertising for the bank.

This year, however, the First National Bank of Lake Forest has come up with something truly unique – a photo history of Lake Forest.

”We’ve been working on this idea for about three years,” says James Herber, a senior vice president at the bank.  “We wanted to do something special for the Bicentennial.”

The something special turned out to be a 12-page book, which is the companion to the bank’s annual report.  Herber says the bank had printed 2,000 copies of the annual report and 5,000 copies of the photo album itself.  “We wanted to be able to give the book to anyone who is interested in Lake Forest history,” he says, “It’s something they can save as a momento of the Bicentennial year.”

LAST SEPTEMBER, the bank announced a photo contest, “Help us find old photographs of Lake Forest,” their ads read, “We’re going to publish a pictorial history of our village.”


We really had no idea what we’d get,” says Herber.  What they got was more than 2,000 old photographs; some singly, some in frames and some in family albums.  According to Herber, when the time came to make a decision about exactly what to do with the 2,000 photos, an ironic thing happened.  “We got a phone call from Bail Buckland, offering her help.”

Mrs. Buckland is a photographic historian with quite impressive credentials.  “We were amazed to learn that she lives in Lake Forest,” says Herber.

Gail Buckland took the job of sorting, cataloguing and later helping to judge the collection of old photographs.  With her knowledge of photographic techniques and her expertise in dating old photos, the collection was narrowed to what Mrs. Buckland terms, “the most interesting 75 photographs.”

These 75 were turned over to local historian Edward Arpee.  “Mr. Arpee went through the pictures and picked the ones he thought no Lake Forest history would be complete without,” says Herber, “and he added some of his own.”  Arpee also provided information for the text of the book.

WHAT RESULTED IS a fine collection of pictures recording such events as the building of Market Square in 1915, the McCormick Flying Machine that same year and the arrival of the Prince of Wales (Edward VIII) in 1924.

Also included in the book are such familiar early Lake Forest names as Samuel Dent and the Farwell, Durand, Ryerson and Holt families.

Herber gives much of the credit to the man who printed the book.  “Rudy Rohner

[caption for top picture]  The light effects in this photo earn expert praise.  The scene is the arrival of the Prince of Wales Edward VIII) in Lake Forest on Oct. 17, 1924.

[caption for bottom picture]  Construction of what was to become America’s first shopping center, Lake Forest’s Market Square, begun in 1917.