Photo 85-BLA-1

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Old Lake County Museum, Wadsworth, IL.

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, east of Wauconda, 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.

The barn is the old Winters barn, they owned a brick and tile yard and kiln. The clay pits that were dug filled with water and made ponds. Years later when Vogel opened the museum he also stocked the ponds with trout and charged people to come fish them.

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