Below are two essays on Lake Forest's legendary Mellody Farm in west Lake Forest. The first is the more recent, developed five years ago for a Lake Forest-Lake Bluff Historical Society program at Mellody Farm, now Lake Forest Academy. The second one is the original mid 1990s account for the Lake Forest Journal. Theese both are dedicated to Helen Yomine, who published the Lake Forest Journal in the mid 1990s and encouraged me to share essays about estates with the comunity. From her encouragement have grown many projects, including both Lake Forest: Estates, People and Culture co-authored by me with Shirley M. Paddock (Arcadia, 2000) and Classic Country Estates of Lake Forest... co-authored by me with Kim Coventry and Daniel Meyer (W.W. Norton, 2003). Both include photo essays on this quinessential Lake Forest estate that survived the upheavals of the mid-twentieth century thanks in large part to Lake Forest Academy. A. Miller September 9, 2009.

Mellody Farm Centennial Facts

Nov. 14, 1904-Nov. 14, 2004

Compiled by Arthur H. Miller, from research also by

Elizabeth Hedsund, Rita McAyeal, and Shirley M. Paddock.

Armour family

Philip Danforth Armour came to Chicago in 1867, twenty years later than Cyrus McCormick; by his death in 1901 he had amassed a fortune in commodities and meatpacking estimated at $100 million by Fortune (April 1931). His designated heir was his son, Jonathan Ogden Armour, who left Yale in his freshman year to assume the leadership of the company. By 1918, with World War I in Europe, the Armour company was worth approximately $1 billion, of which J. Ogden was direct owner of 72% (the rest owned by other Armours). He was the second wealthiest American, after Rockefeller then. But by 1923, he had lost his fortune and his empire (and that of his relations) had been sold, after he tried to counter the negative economic forces of the post-war depression of 1919-23. He died in 1927, but the family regained much of its (real dollar value) fortune after 1930, with the sale of J. Ogden’s investment in Universal Oil Products. J. Ogden married Lolita Sheldon and they had one daughter, Lolita, later Mrs. John J. Mitchell Jr. Lolita Mitchell’s grandmother, Mrs. Philip D. Armour, outlived her spouse by many years, lived in the country with her son, and even survived P.D.’s fortune, as well.

Mellody Farm land acquisition

The Armour country place west of Lake Forest began in 1904, coinciding with the “arrival” of cars in Lake Forest, according to a Waukegan Sun story found by Shirley M. Paddock. John Griffith, local realtor and associate of Armour’s fellow meat packer and Lake Forest summer resident Louis F. Swift, put together the land deal which became Armour’s Mellody Farm. This was reported in The Lake Forester for December 17, 1904. The key purchase of over 300 acres was of the pioneer Martin Melody farm, the site today of the Lake Forest Academy buildings and grounds. The sale is listed as November 14, 1904 on a map dated 1914, found by Shirley Paddock among the John Griffith papers in the Griffith Grant & Lackie Realtors, Inc. (hereafter GGL) archives. A month later on December 15, 1904 the east side entry from today’s Waukegan Road, now Lake Forest Open Lands property, was purchased from the Kennedy family and others, as well. By 1914 the estate covered over 840 acres, mostly of land bought in 1904-05, but with other purchases, mostly west, as late as 1909, including from the Dennis Gibbonses, Mrs. Gibbons being pioneer settler Patrick Melody’s granddaughter. A requirement of J. Ogden’s was that all five local railroad lines should be east of his new country place. The Melody property was west of all five of Lake Forest’s railroad lines--two C & NW tracks, two North Shore Line tracks and the C M & SP tracks, which traversed the Armour property. The total land acquisition cost by 1914 was $150,000, though Melody also lived in an Armour-owned house on Vine St. a few doors from John Griffith himself, and apparently a part of the deal.

Design and construction, 1905-1908

According to the venerable architect and respected critic Peter B. Wight (Architectural Review, Feb. 1916, p. 98 col. 2), Chicago society architect Arthur Heun (1866-1946; see Classic Country Estates of Lake Forest...) was given by the Armours “control of all the work...” from “designs which were entirely his own....” He selected others, including landscape architect Ossian C. Simonds (1857-1931) for the main landscape design and construction (roads, the bridge) and related tree planting and also Simonds’ fellow Prairie Style master Jens Jensen (1860-1951), for planting within the overall garden plan Heun developed. New York interior design reformer Elsie De Wolf (1865-1950) was selected for the interiors and furnishings. Each of these experts Heun drew into the project were founders of their fields (and authors of influential books)--the two landscape men of the midwestern indigenous approach to landscape (Prairie Style) and De Wolf of post Gilded Age classic simplicity in home interiors. Heun himself brought midwestern estate design, a field relatively new itself, to a new level with this commission.

Construction took place between 1905 and when the family tentatively moved in on May 5, 1908, though work undoubtedly continued after that. The general contractor was Chicago-based W.J. Newman, according to a contemporary newspaper article found among the GGL archives by Shirley M. Paddock. Newman invented and built a “powerful steam shovel” to excavate the extensive basement and foundation from the top, rather than from below, as was typical. Fifty men and twenty-five teams of horses were engaged on the earth excavations, with a temporary village of boarding houses, shops, and stables. An embankment 22 ft. tall and a half mile long shielded the house from the CM & SP rail line traversing the property north to south east of the house and gardens.

The American Renaissance country house, as Wight termed it (he thought it not a villa), is in the form of a letter “H”, 164 ft. square; the long central hall is 112 ft. by 45 ft. With dependencies (kitchen, laundry, etc.) the house in 1916 was 419 feet long. The house contained 29,000 sq. ft. of living space. The house and grounds were thought to have cost $10 million.

Styles and character of house, grounds, gardens and interior

Heun’s house had many Italian national style characteristics: the pair of towers on the front entry (and the campanile on the stable block), the arched doorways and windows, the stuccoed walls, and the red tile roof. The low, rambling exterior appearance beyond the basic “H” plan and the low-pitched hipped roofs are Chicago School in character. The careful siting and plan, the central spine for circulation, the hall, the repetition of the window spacing and other exterior features, and the relation of the house to its gardens are classic or Beaux-Arts, with some contemporary Arts & Crafts elements for the gardens (pergolas, smaller spaces, naturalistic planting by Jensen, etc.). The dignity of the exterior continues in the interior and the furnishings seen in the contemporary photos, with much of the decor following De Wolf’s taste for classic late Bourbon French and Georgian elements. The library’ paneling, in the southwest corner, is late English Renaissance, in the manner of sculptor/carver Grinling Gibbons (1648-1721) and the smaller far west small library room, for Mrs. Armour, has paneling documented as being from an 18th C. London town house. Like architect James Gamble Rogers’ then neighboring 1902-04 Westmoreland for A.B. Dick, this was described as an American Renaissance style country house, reflecting the new transatlantic cosmopolitanism of the Chicago social and economic elite.

Pre-Academy history of the estate

After the disappearance of the Armour fortune in the mid 1920s the family gave up the house, which was sold by 1927 to a syndicate of Lake Foresters, working with John Griffith again, who planned to build a country club with a golf course around the buildings. Though construction was completed on a club house/locker room to the north (later the chapel and fine arts building) that was designed, according to Bill Hinchliff, by former F.L. Wright associate Herman von Holst, the Crash and Depression ended the club idea. After the Depression, which had wiped out major club backer Samuel Insull and others, the property again was on the market, as GGL papers document, and sold, according to Hinchliff, to Chicago Depression-era business leader Frank Lewis, apparently not a resident on the estate, who worked to keep the place up for about a decade, selling off parcels to John F. Cuneo and others. In 1947 he sold the remaining 600 acres, the estate’s core, to Lake Forest Academy, the main 1893 Pond & Pond building (also of very high quality) of the institution having burned the previous year. The rest constitutes the modern history of the Academy and of Ferry Hall, which left its east Lake Forest home also to join the newly co-ed Academy in 1973.

Arthur H. Miller

Archivist and Librarian for Special Collections

Donnelley and Lee Library/LIT

Lake Forest College

Lake Forest, IL 60045-2399

847-735-5064 voice, -6296 or –6297 fax

amiller@lakeforest.edu

November 12, 2004, rev. April 23, 2006

LAKE FOREST COUNTRY HOUSES: NUMBER 5

J. OGDEN ARMOUR'S ITALIAN VILLA, "MELLODY FARM" (1908)

Architect Arthur Huen's great villa (now Lake Forest Academy, north of Route 60 and just west of the west branch of the Skokie River) announced the arrival on the prairie of a new spirit in country places, one found in the title of Edith Wharton's 1904 book, Italian Villas & Their Gardens. This followed a less comprehensive 1894 book on the same subject by Charles Platt, who a dozen years later would design Harold and Edith McCormick's "Villa Turicum" on the lake. Confronting directly the Olmsted/English landscape tradition, these books represented a revival of formal European garden styles, centered on Italian Renaissance villa achievements. From this perspective gardens became extensions of houses, series of outdoor rooms for various occasions, times of day, etc. Mellody Farm, though, was vast-enough and its terrain was flatly un Italian-enough as to permit both a good evocation of Italian villa vocabulary and also some beautiful prairie vistas. The J. Ogden Armour estate, today much of it Lake Forest Academy and (new) Open Lands property, was a major departure for Chicago and Lake Forest, and one that would prove influential.

J. Ogden Armour, according to local historian Edward Arpee (1964, 1991) the second-richest man in the world before he lost his fortune in the depression of 1921, was a representative second-generation scion of a Chicago/Porkopolis fortune. Better than most, the Armours reflect the leverage -- described by William Cronon in his 1991 Nature's Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West -- of the railroad in funnelling the wealth of the West through Chicago and, in this case, the Union Stockyards. This mid-continental imperial capitol, Chicago, accumulated in the last third of the nineteenth century unprecedented wealth from Cronon's funnel, centered on a few families. These were the oil sheiks and Asian cartel leaders of a century ago: buying up art, etc. Especially after the labor strife particularly in 1886 (McCormick/Haymarket Affair) and 1894 (Pullman), the focus of Chicago domestic architecture shifted to the country, to Lake Forest just north of protective Fort Sheridan. And the biggest project was Mellody Farm, in the new Italian vein, with some Prairie horizontal character. In this golden moment forces converged to create in Lake Forest and in a few other places in America (Newport, Gatsby's Long Island, the southern California Mediterranean-like coast) "charmed circles," to use a term used by Lake Forest genteel author Hobart Chatfield-Taylor. Here sprouted up villas in the grand manner of previous cultural high-water marks: Pliny's Rome and Tuscany, Renaissance Florence and Venice, seventeenth century France, and eighteeenth-century England. The Platt and Wharton books, both serialized in influential genteel-tradition periodicals, set the standard and fired the imaginations of an increasingly well-travelled American upper-class -- the sort of people encountered in Italian novels and stories by Henry James.

Mellody Farms, as Arpee says Mrs. Armour named the estate, was ambitious and on a scale with its builders' means. Arpee describes it well: a driveway of two miles, a main building 180 x 500 feet, twenty marble fireplaces, and its own railroad station where guests were met by "uniformed and cockaded grooms" to be taken to the house. The gardens, too, are pictured and described in Griswold's 1991 book, The Golden Age of American Gardens... (Abrams). Jens Jensen did much of the landscaping, with three reflecting pools and formal elements interspersed with his signature native prairie plants. O.C. Simonds too was employed to create the mile-long drive to the house from Waukegan Road. Today, west of the main house which now is Lake Forest Academy, are the outlines and remains of the magnificent formal gardens -- still dramatic statements of the characteristic Italian unity of house and grounds.

From Armour's fall in the 1920s to the Academy's arrival in the 1940s, the property was in a latent state. Arpee reports that a group headed by Samuel Insull (whose own Italian villa to the west is now the Cuneo Museum on Milwaukee Road) bought Mellody Farm to convert it into "an Aviation Golf Club." But while this effort was in progress, the collapse of 1929 intervened. Only after the depression and the war did this estate come to house the growing Academy in 1948, following its fire near Lake Forest College in 1946. In 1985 Lake-Forest-raised novelist Ward Just returned home to address the Friends of the Lake Forest Library and recalled sitting in an upper-story bedroom-turned-Academy classroom shortly after the move. Rather than hearing instructor Arpee's lesson on mathematics, he imagined Fitzgerald characters moving through the stately rooms. Just before that, too, a PBS version of Fitzgerald's story "Under the Biltmore Clock" was filmed at Mellody Farm.

And by 1993 when I brought some French tourists to see the formal gardens west of the house -- having already stopped by the remains of the Jensen/Shaw garden for "Havenwood" on Ringwood at Mayflower (by 2009 the site of a home) -- they exclaimed "How amusing to come to America to see ruins!" Just beyond the now-fragile garden structures pictured in their prime in the Griswold book is one of the reflecting ponds and, beyond that, the sounds of the tollway. For west Lake Forest is on the busy inter-metropolitan axis between Chicago and Milwaukee, in the county Fortune labelled in a July 1993 issue the fourth fastest job-growth area in the nation (after Orlando, Las Vegas, and West Palm Beach). Driving in we had heard the sounds of saws cutting down Jensen's now magestic trees planted early in the twentieth century, but culturally a millenium ago. This royal-preserve-like forest was yielding to an economic imperative which barely can be slowed down. [The proceeds of this venture funded a major burst of energy at the Academy, leaving it much enahnced by 2009.]

Fortunately, Lake Forest Open Lands and generous,far-sighted property-owners have preserved the eastern end of the Mellody Farm estate, on Waukegan Road. The classic gate house and entry gate there have been beautifully preserved as well since the mid 1990s. But, overall, one of the greatest flowerings of country-place culture in history -- of which Mellody Farms was a dominant feature -- appeared to be disappearing very quickly, indeed, in 1994 or 1995. Happily in 2009 the pi9cture is much brighter.

Arthur H. Miller

November 1, 1994; corrected March 17, 1995; modestly updated, September 9, 2009.