The founders of Lake Forest, a group from the Second Presbyterian Church of Chicago, intended to "establish an institution of learning of a high order in which Christian teaching would hold a central place." For the college and accompanying town, they searched out a site on the city's North Shore, where the Lake Forest Association purchased a wooded area on the lake, broken by ravines. Almerin Hotchkiss, a landscape designer who had previously designed large cemeteries in Brooklyn, St. Louis, and Rock Island, Illinois, laid out the town in 1857. His design for Lake Forest echoes the picturesque style of nineteenth-century cemeteries in the curving streets that converge at the depot of the Chicago and Milwaukee Railroad. On this 1873 map, the underlying grid shows plainly beneath the irregular curved streets; section and subsection lines run north-south and east-west without deviation. On the western portion of the map, the curved streets disappear, and straight streets return.

Source: Chicago Historical Society (ICHi-16261)