Lake County Forest Preserve

Lakewood Farms is located one mile east of Wauconda, IL off of Route 176 near the corner of Fairfield Rd. Today, it is known as the Lakewood Forest Preserve as part of the Lake County Forest Preserve District.

In 1936, Malcom J. Boyle, founder of the M. J. Boyle & Co. in 1925 and who helped construct the Illinois Tollway system, originally purchased a 300 acre parcel of farmland. He continued purchasing surrounding acres that grew to 1,056 acres. Boyle died in 1959 and in 1961, Howard B. Quinn, president of Quinn Home Builders of Chicago purchased the farm. Quinn eventually lost the property to the bank in 1965. In 1976, the County of Lake purchased the property for the purpose of a forest preserve and to locate the Lake County Museum here.

The original privately owned Lake County Museum of History was organized in 1957 by Robert W. Vogel and Dr. Lawrence R. Qualmann who formed the Valley View Farms Corp. with Vogel being the museum director. The museum was located on Wadsworth Road at Skokie Highway (Route 41) in a converted barn. The barn was unheated and by 1965 the Lake County Board of Supervisors purchased the artifacts but had no facility to open a museum.

A fundraising effort failed to raise enough funds to build a new Lake County Museum so the artifacts were stored in an abandoned underground Nike missile site near Lake Zurich. It wasn't until September 1976 when one of the buildings at the Lakewood Forest Preserve was converted to house the Lake County Museum. In 2000, the name of the museum was changed to the Lake County Discovery Museum. Finally, in 2018, a new facility was built for the museum in Libertyville and the current name of the museum is the Bess Bower Dunn Museum.