Tucked away in eastern Walworth County is a little-known piece of Wisconsin history.
Lake Ivanhoe, an unincorporated town built along a lake with the same name, was once Wisconsin’s only black-owned community. Just off Highway 50 and five miles east of Lake Geneva, it was founded in 1926 as a resort for affluent African-Americans from Chicago seeking refuge from the city’s racial tensions. Its founders bought the land through a white real estate investor and named the streets for black heroes like Crispus Attucks, Benjamin Banneker and Phyllis Wheatley.
By the mid-1930s, the Depression had largely wiped out the founding investors and the dream of creating a black Lake Geneva died, says Sam Gonzalez, a retired Walworth County teacher who wrote a history of Lake Ivanhoe.
But blacks continued migrating to the rustic, African-American haven. In the 1960s, recalls Peter Baker, his parents bought a summer home that eventually became a year-round residence. “We didn’t even know this was a special place,” he recalls. “We just knew this was a safe place.”
Baker still lives where he grew up, which is unusual. “They could never keep the young people,” says Gonzalez. “Opportunities weren’t available.”
Instead, the community has become more integrated. Baker recently conducted an informal census, identifying 40 African-American, 77 white and 14 Hispanic households. Since 2004, some 25 new homes have been started, some by whites like Martie Wells. The town of Bloomfield, Wis., clerk discovered the town while campaigning door to door a decade ago. Having spent most of her adult life in San Francisco’s East Bay before returning to the Midwest, she found multicultural Lake Ivanhoe “like being at home… a place where people still go out on the street and talk to each other.”
African-Americans worry Lake Ivanhoe’s heritage could be lost. “It’s going fast,” laments Betty Vorpagel, a resident since 1949. Baker remains hopeful. “I would like it to be in the history books,” he says.
