Founder - Samuel Insull

Samuel Insull (1859-1938)

The creator of Countryside Lake in 1926, one of the wealthiest men in Illinois at the time

(the below image and text is from a book: "The Memoirs of Samuel Insull")

Samuel Insull, One of the 20th century’s most famous and controversial financiers traveled from London, England to Mundelein, Illinois and created Countryside Lake Association.

Born in London in 1859, Samuel Insull obtained his first job at the age of 14. Beginning as office boy with a London firm of auctioneers8, Insull went on to become one of the world’s wealthiest financiers before losing everything in the Great Depression of the 1930s. He died in a Paris subway in 1938, virtually penniless by some reports. But during his extraordinary life, he found his way to a spot in Fremont Township where he created Countryside Lake.

In 1881, at the age of 22 and after working for Thomas Edison’s representative in Europe, Insull came to the U. S. to serve as Edison’s personal secretary. As Insull handled the details of Edison’s personal life and finances, the inventor and the businessman became close personally, and were said to be constant companions.

By 1892, in New York, Insull was Vice President and primary organizational manager of Edison’s electrical equipment manufacturing venture, General Electric. That year Insull was asked to move to Chicago as President of the then-struggling Chicago Edison Company.

It was in Chicago that Insull’s own financial empire took root and flourished. He had become convinced that the greatest future for the new electrical industry lay in control of electric power stations rather than in the manufacturing of electrical equipment. By 1907 he had consolidated Chicago’s electric businesses and founded Commonwealth Edison Company.9 In addition, Insull acquired control of related transportation businesses, including Chicago-area electric railroads, the North Shore Line, the South Shore Line, and the Chicago Elevated Railways. He also invested in natural gas and coal utilities, and founded Peoples Gas Company. By the time of his empire’s collapse in 1930, utilities built and managed by Insull produced electricity in 32 states and provided a tenth of the electricity in the United States.10

Insull sought his own respite from city life in 1906, when he purchased a 160-acre farm in Lake County. He created his country estate there, known then as Red Top Farms, and constructed a mansion on Milwaukee Avenue, just outside of Libertyville. The mansion was purchased by the John Cuneo family after Insull’s financial ruin and is known today as the Cuneo Museum and Gardens.

According to Insull himself:

“During the years of my most active business life, I was mainly interested, outside of business, in farming. A love of the land was inborn in me. It was natural, with my family antecedents, that I should have that same desire for acquisition of landed property that most men of English birth or antecedents have.”

Finding himself in the country with limited electric service (dusk to midnight) might have generated Insull’s new endeavor, the “Lake County Experiment … the electrification of virtually every farm in the Midwest…”12 At a time when his railroads were expanding and transporting more and more commuters from the farthest reaches of Chicago’s suburbs to the city, Insull’s vision of developing those farthest reaches took hold – a vision encompassing residences, industry, jobs, and an exponentially-increasing demand for electric service.

By the early 1920s he had purchased thousands of acres of land in and around Mundelein, and in 1926 his North Shore Line commuter railroad was extended from Evanston to Mundelein. Insull installed water lines, sewers, fire hydrants, and paved roads in Mundelein.

In November of 1923, Insull created a land development trust known as the Lake County Land Association. Insull and friends acquired vast expanses of acreage west of Mundelein – land that would encompass a new and exclusive country community, which would become Countryside Lake Association.

Articles

On the cover of Time Magazine

and 3 associated articles

Sam Insull with Theodore Roosevelt

How he financed his operations

Books about Samuel Insull