History
The Lockhart Family Nature Center was originally the gatehouse of J. Ogden Armour's Mellody Farm. This lavish 1,000 acre estate took four years and $10 million to construct and was finished in 1909. The Italian Renaissance gatehouse and the estate home (now Lake Forest Academy) were designed by architect Arthur Huen. Prior to working almost exclusively in the revivalist styles, Huen spent several years in the Prairie School alongside Frank Lloyd Wright and Dwight Perkins. Ogden Armour also retained two of the brightest and best-known landscape architects of the time, Ossian Simmonds and Jens Jensen. Their design included both formal gardens and more naturalized elements such as the Jens Jensen pond. Remnants of Jensen's design including the pond's teardrop shape, the eastern red cedar trees and the stone retaining wall are still evident today. In 1998, Open Lands carefully restored the Jensen pond, preserving both the important cultural and ecological characteristics of this wetland. In 1999, the Steiner family donated a Jens Jensen council ring from their home on Green Bay Road. The council ring now overlooks our Jens Jensen pond and is used for educational programs.
Ogden Armour was the son of the meatpacking magnate Philip Danforth Armour. After his father's death at the turn of the century, Ogden inherited the family business and soon amassed one of the greatest fortunes in America. In the mid-1920s, after an unsuccessful attempt to corner the wheat market, the Armours fell into bankruptcy and lost nearly everything including the Mellody Farm Estate. In 1947 Lake Forest Academy purchased the estate house, which now serves as its central building. The gatehouse and surrounding land remained in private ownership until Open Lands purchased the 50-acre property in 1994 with the intention of renovating the gatehouse into a community environmental learning center and restoring the lands as a nature preserve.
The beautiful and historic Middlefork valley landscape that first attracted the Armour Family nearly one hundred years ago is still largely intact in the 50-acre Mellody Farm Nature Preserve and the adjacent 514-acre Middlefork Savanna Forest Preserve. Just as visitors to this special place have done for thousands of years, one can still walk this land and experience the beauty and tranquility of the majestic, ancient oak groves, the rolling tallgrass prairies and the secluded wetlands.
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