Lake Forest College

to the Methodist Northwestern University in Evanston. It was originally named Lind University after Sylvester Lind, who had given $80,000 to launch the school. Patterson and his fellow Chicago Presbyterians established 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, …