Building A Dream - Lisa Schmelz · 2010-08-28 · 24 n Spring 2009 n At the LAke n 25 Building A...

24 n www.atthelakemagazine.com Spring 2009 n At the LAke n 25

Building A Dream How three men created a lakeside haven for

“discriminating colored people”

By Lisa M. Schmelz

The unincorporated town of Lake Ivanhoe doesn’t look like much if you’re just passing

through. Take a Sunday drive out there and all you’ll find is a quiet subdivision nestled up

against a sleepy lake. Tucked behind a slight rise in the landscape five miles east of Lake

Geneva, there are no guarded gates or dramatic entrances to welcome you.

There is merely a small green sign on Highway 50 that reads, “Lake Ivanhoe.”

But behind that tiny sign, and in this tiny place, is actually something quite significant:

Lake Ivanhoe was once Wisconsin’s only black-owned community. Photo caption.


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Founded in 1926 as a resort for affluent African-Americans from Chicago, this is a community whose storied history and cast of intriguing characters has all the makings of an epic miniseries. Played out against the backdrop of the roaring ’20s, the Great Depression and, ultimately, the Civil Rights movement, Lake Ivanhoe is a reminder that the barriers of racism were once as firmly rooted in geography as they were in the minds of those in power.

“Given the times, I definitely believe the men who started Lake Ivanhoe were pio-neers, so to speak,” states third-generation Lake Ivanhoe resident Robin Vance, whose mother, Gwendolyn, was the first black stu-dent to attend public school in Walworth County, and whose grandparents were the community’s first year-round residents. “There was resistance and a lot of obstacles, but they didn’t back down. They were very brave and they had a dream.”

A dreamThe saga that is Lake Ivanhoe started like most new things do — with a dream. In the early 1920s, black professionals in

Photo caption.


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Chicago, like their white peers, wanted a place to escape the bustle of the city. But unlike their white peers, black Chicago professionals also needed a way to protect their families from the sometimes-violent results of the growing racial unrest that was taking hold of the Windy City.

Enter three prominent black Chicago community leaders: Jeremiah Brumfield, Bradford Watson and Frank Anglin. Brum-field and Watson, both lawyers, were rising stars in Chicago political circles. Anglin was a self-made man who emigrated to the U.S. from Jamaica when he was 18. Fate brought this trio together, and the end result was the purchase on July 1, 1926, of 83 acres in the Bloomfield Township of eastern Walworth County.

The purchase was made with the intent of creating a first-class resort for Chicago’s black community. Because critical back-ing had come from, of all places, a white real estate speculator named Ivan Bell, the lake, which had been known until then as Ryan Lake, was renamed to honor this major investor.

“It was supposed to be as big as Lake Geneva. It was supposed to be the first black-owned community in Wisconsin. These people who came to Lake Ivanhoe were prominent citizens in Chicago. They were lawyers, doctors, Pullman porters, school teachers. They were people who had upper-class jobs and wanted a safe place to go and enjoy recreational oppor-tunities or a place to get their families away from dangers in the city,” explains Samuel Gonzales, a retired middle school history teacher from Lake Geneva whose 1972 masters thesis is still the definitive history on Lake Ivanhoe.

Shortly after the streets, named for peo-ple and events in black history, were laid, advertisements for Lake Ivanhoe went into major Chicago newspapers and handbills were circulated in higher-income black neighborhoods. On opening day, no expense was spared. Cab Calloway and his band were hired to provide music and every detail was tended to. In an interview with Gonzales, Gwendolyn Vance, whose parents bought property in Lake Ivanhoe in the 1920s to boost her failing health

At the Lake wishes to acknowl-

edge Samuel L. Gonzales, Lake

Geneva School District history

teacher. Much of the material for

this article came from his mas-

ter thesis: “A Black Community

in Rural Wisconsin: A Histor-

ical Study of Lake Ivanhoe.”

When he researched his the-

sis in the early 1970s, he went

straight to some of the com-

munity’s founding residents for

first-hand accounts of what life in

Lake Ivanhoe was like. Many of

these residents, in their seventh

or eighth decades of life when

Gonzales interviewed them, have

long-since passed away.

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with fresh air, recalled the big day, “[They] hired cabs to come out here and bring the people from Chicago, while the meters ticked the whole time. That’s the day my mother and father bought their lot.”

Sales for the 1927 spring grand opening of Lake Ivanhoe far exceeded expecta-tions. Anglin, Brumfield, Watson and their backers had been right: There was a mar-ket for a black-owned resort. It was soon decided that Anglin, who had a significant background in sales, would be the resort’s full-time sales manager and remain on-site overseeing day-to-day operations while continuing to bring in new owners.

The centerpiece of Lake Ivanhoe was a massive lakefront pavilion. Describing the structure, Anglin’s wife, Epsy, explained: They put up a great big pavilion. A $40,000 pavilion. At that time, it was either the largest or the second largest pavilion in the state of Wisconsin. [It had] a big dance floor with a veranda all the way around it. It was right up on top of the hillside. They had a soda fountain and a snack bar near the front

and a restaurant in the back. They made a beach and it had a nice pier with a high-dive.

After the grand opening, sales were brisk and black Chicagoans flocked to Lake Ivanhoe for weekend entertainment. Prize fights, beauty contests, slot machines and fishing derbies made Lake Ivanhoe a veri-table hotspot. The dream of creating a first-class black resort had been achieved. But the dream would not last long.

The crashThe first sign of economic tremors for Lake Ivanhoe surfaced when Clarence Muse, a black comedian character actor, was signed to play at the pavilion. A popu-lar entertainer in Los Angeles, Muse was said to be quite a charmer and quickly gained the trust of Anglin, Brumfield and Watson. In the summer of 1929, however, Muse went missing — along with a large sum of the resort’s money. Though no definitive evidence linking Muse to the theft of pavilion funds was ever discov-ered, efforts to locate him and the missing money proved futile.

Many fond remembrances of Lake Ivanhoe st i l l l ive on.“My husband wouldn’t leave this place until he had just enough time to get into that office. He would rather stay the weekend and get up at six o’clock in the morning and make it to Chicago.”

--- Epsy Anglin on her husband, Frank Anglin, a founding member of Lake Ivanhoe. During the sum-mer months, his family, like many, would remain at Lake Ivanhoe, while he worked in the city.

“We came up here and picked the lots out with a foot of snow on the ground. There was no electricity, nothing. We moved into a summer cottage the 28th of March, and I mean it was strictly a summer cottage. You could go in the kitchen any morning and find frozen water, but I never regretted it.”

--- Maude Gordon, wife of Ernest Gordan, and one of Lake Ivanhoe’s first year-round residents. The Gor-dans moved to Lake Ivanhoe in 1937 and Ernest continued to work in Chi-cago with the Pullman Company.

“I never spent any summers in Chi-cago, never in my life. Dad felt everyone should have a vacation where he could see chickens, pigs, cows and horses. To him, this was part of our education.”

--- Billie Phillips, daughter of Lake Ivanhoe founder Jeremiah Brumfield

Photo caption.


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While attempting to recover from the loss of funds, the Lake Ivanhoe Realty Corpo-ration endured another hit when the stock market collapsed in October of 1929. As unemployment reached record highs across the country, the black community was especially hard hit.

“My husband couldn’t make it any lon-ger. They weren’t able to keep up the payroll, where there should have been commissions on sales. He was making the

sales, but he wasn’t getting any money,” recounted Espy. “Some things they had to pay: rent, telephone and certain bills up here in Lake Ivanhoe. They had to pay it and when it came down to it, then there was no money. They [Brumfield and Wat-son] could afford to do without, but he [Anglin] couldn’t, but he did. Every week he would tell me ‘Well, maybe next week people will make payments enough and I’ll have some money.’ Well, I didn’t like that. I’ve got a little baby here and she’s

the youngest of six. They were going to put Lake Ivanhoe over real big, but people didn’t have any money.”

Anglin’s hope that the new resort could somehow withstand the bleak economic times didn’t last long and he soon returned to working in Chicago during the week. In December 1929, a full-scale economic crisis was at hand and the Lake Ivanhoe Realty Corporation was unable to continue making its payments. Foreclosure pro-ceedings began in January of 1930 on the unsold lots. Many homeowners, struggling to keep up with their payments and stay current on their property taxes, also lost their homes and lots in Lake Ivanhoe.

Recalling her father’s reaction, Billie Phillips, Jeremiah Brumfield’s daughter, shared: “He was a person that accepted things. And whatever turn it would take, he could develop it to its potential . . . he wanted another Lake Geneva for his people . . . They wanted it first-class like the rest of the resorts. He didn’t want a run-down shack town . . . Dad lost quite a bit when the crash came in 1929.”

The pavilion, which once drew hundreds of revelers nightly to listen to top enter-tainers of the day, disappeared almost as quickly as it was built. Nearly 40 years after Gonzales completed his thesis on Lake Ivanhoe, he still marvels at how quickly the pavilion was gone. Walk the hillside today where the grand pavilion once stood, he says, and you won’t find a trace of it.

“Piece by piece it was dismantled,” explains Gonzales. “Piece by piece during the Depression, as people needed parts or wood, it disappeared. It’s hard to believe that something like that can disappear so fast, but times were hard.”

Those properties were eventually pur-chased by Edward Sternaman. A football player with the Chicago Bears, Sternaman also hoped to develop Lake Ivanhoe into a first-class resort — for whites. In an effort to drive out the remaining black residents, Sternaman constructed a fence around portions of the lakefront and blocked

access to community recreational facilities. Residents filed suit and ultimately pre-vailed in court. The fence was removed. Sternaman then sold his interests to a real estate agency in Chicago.

Taking a standThough the depression permanently eliminated the black resort, black Chi-cago residents continued to find their way to this rural hamlet. By the late 1930s, home sales and new construction gath-ered steam and the community began to have a mix of summer and year-round resi-dents. Handbills that circulated in Chicago in 1937 proclaimed Lake Ivanhoe as the “exclusive” and “preferred summer home of discriminating colored people.”

As the decades marched on, Lake Ivan-hoe continued to adapt to the changing world. While the original black residents were able to distance themselves from racism of the surrounding county, future residents weren’t so fortunate. Sometimes racism greeted Lake Ivanhoe residents at their front doors when white delivery-men, unaware they were delivering to a

black household, refused to enter their homes. Other times, they encountered racisim while attempting to buy grocer-ies, get a haircut or cast a line at another nearby lake.

Nettie Hatters moved to Lake Ivanhoe in the early 1940s and was the first black person to work for Lakeland Hospital. At the hospital, and in surrounding commu-nities, Hatters and other blacks were not welcome: “When I first came here, there was a sign up at Paddock Lake saying, ‘No Negroes or Jews allowed.’ You couldn’t go down there to go swimming either. The attitude of the surrounding communities was cool. You stayed in your place, where you were supposed to be. You don’t come around us.”

As the Civil Rights movement gained national momentum in the ’60s, local change was taking place as well. The Riv-ieria Ballroom, which had never admitted blacks except as custodians, would soon face a direct challenge from Hatters and her white neighbor, Caroline Wilkins.

I f you goTo get to Lake Ivanhoe from downtown Lake Geneva, take Highway 50 east about five miles. Watch for the little sign on the south side of the road that reads “Lake Ivanhoe” and turn right when you see it. Lake Ivanhoe itself is a small body of water, with a maximum depth of about 12 feet. To get to the lake, simply follow Mariondale Road until it dead-ends into the community center. Just before the dead-end, turn right onto a gravel road. When the water is open, you can fish for bluegill, large mouth bass or northern pike by shore or on boat.

Photo caption.


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When Louie Armstrong was booked to play at the Riviera, Wilkins made reser-vations for herself, Hatters and Hatters’s husband, Dave. Not surprisingly, they were all refused entrance by the doorman. The Hatters’ and Wilkins refused to give up and demanded to speak with the man-ager. Enraged, the manager told them: “You are here raising a whole lot of heck and trying to cause trouble. You can’t come in here because there are two different kinds of people I don’t like in my place, and that’s Negroes and poor white trash.’”

Wilkins went directly to Armstrong’s tour bus to report the situation to Armstrong’s manager, after which Armstrong sent word that he would not play unless they were admitted. Once inside, though, they were refused beverage service. Humiliated by their treatment, the group took legal action. With support from the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and attorney William Trinke of Lake Geneva, they were able to reverse decades of discrimination and have the policy of refusing blacks into the ballroom removed permanently. The following year when Armstrong returned, many black residents from Lake Ivanhoe attended his concert “without incident.”

Hoping for a place in historyWhile Lake Ivanhoe’s run as a black-owned resort was short-lived, its legacy endures. Vance, though, simply wishes it were easier for people to find this slice of history.

“There should be a big wood-carved sign like you see when you go into any other village,” she says. “I think that would be very befitting.”

While Baker, son of original Lake Ivanhoe landowners, whose mother took him to march with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., on more than one occasion, agrees that Lake Ivanhoe deserves better signage, he’d like to go a step further.

“I would like to see Lake Ivanhoe put into State history books so kids can learn about it,” he says. “Then, it would never be lost.”

Building A Dream - Lisa Schmelz · 2010-08-28 · 24 n Spring 2009 n At the LAke n 25 Building A...

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