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Community Corner

Patch Passport: Travel Back in Time - Lake Bluff's Village Hall

Travel Back in Time with your Patch Passport to explore the history and roots of your community. Lake Bluff Village Hall's Ghost Story is sure to spook you.

It was almost 50 years after Lake Bluff’s founding and after its incorporation that the town finally erected its Village Hall.

The tiny hamlet was making a transition from its early history as the lakeside attraction for visitors traveling to the Methodist “camp meeting” to a summer resort town with some 100 year-round residents.

Then as today, Village Hall served as a welcoming beacon for visitors, said Vliet Museum Curator Janet Nelson.

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“For visitors who enter from the west, off Sheridan Road, the building says ‘Here we are, this is Lake Bluff,’ ” Nelson said.

It was also a legitimizing step for local government, serving not only as a place for village meetings, but also as the police station, town jail and a clubhouse for the volunteer fire department.

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Their presence may have helped preserve it, as the majority of the town’s other wooden structures burned at one time or another, Nelson said. The fire department was housed in Village Hall until 1948.

Built with money from a village business deal with the Chicago and North Western railroad, Village Hall is among several local buildings now in the National Register of Historic Places.

It was worth the wait from a design standpoint, because by the time its plans were drawn up in 1905, the town was able to employ architect Webster Tomlinson, an early associate of Frank Lloyd Wright.

Certain elements of the building are nascent “Prairie School,” including, according to National Register documents, “the broad overhang, low-pitched roof and geometric forms in its massing.”

But the protean style attributed to Wright and colleagues had not quite gelled in 1905, and Tomlinson also threw in Tudor Revival elements, like the decorative half timbering, Nelson said.

The building’s tower, which is perhaps its most striking feature, was missing for the majority of its lifespan.

Built originally to dry fire hoses but never used for that purpose, it was removed due to disrepair in 1935 not replaced until a $75,000 centennial fundraising campaign in 1995.

“It was the Great Depression; there was just no money to fix it,” Nelson said.

The newly erected tower is lit at night and a carillon chimes from noon to six each day.

“It’s a very welcoming building,” Nelson said.

Not long before Village Hall lost its tower, it gained a murder mystery that made national news. The tale of Elfrieda Knaak is retold as part of the museum’s biannual ghost walk.

On Oct. 30, the 29-year-old Deerfield woman was found nude and still living but fatally injured with burns to her hands, feet and head.

She died three days later, after claiming that she inflicted the burns herself in the Village Hall boiler furnace as a way to prove her “psychic love” for the town’s night watchman. There was an inquest, but no one ever was charged with her death.

Although some modern retellings of the story say “to this day” Village Hall employees see her ghost, Lake Bluff engineer George Russell says it is not true.

“I’ve been working in the village hall longer than anyone else and I have never had an encounter or sensed her presence,” Russell said.

He said he does keep a copy of an old newspaper clipping detailing the tale that he shows to new employees to warn them of lingering spirits.

“I just do that to kid around,” he said.

Village Hall, at 40 E. Center Ave., is open for visitors from 8 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. 

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