Lake Zurich is the name of a village located in Lake County near Chicago in the state of Illinois. The village was named after the lake of the same moniker, which is actually located completely outside the perimeter of the village. Six years ago, back in 2006, Frommer’s named the village of Lake Zurich one of the top 100 places to move to in order to raise a family, while US News also named it one of the top 25 most affordable areas to live in the whole of the United States.
Lake Zurich has an elevation of 850 feet over sea level, with a complete area of 6.9 square miles according to the US Census Bureau. 6.5 square miles is land, with 0.4 square miles being composed of water. The landscape of the village of Lake Zurich is primarily composed of beach (near the lake), forest and marshland. There were 18,104 people living in Lake Zurich at the time of the census in 2000, with 4,866 families and 5,746 households. Of those households, 54.3% contained children below the age of 18, 75.3% featured married couples who were living together, 7.1% featured a female householder but no husband, 15.3 percent did not house families and 12.4 percent consisted of individuals, with 3.5% being someone over the age of 65 who was living alone.
Europeans were the first to settle the area of Lake Zurich back in the 1830s. Two of the early pioneers to the area were Seth Paine, who was responsible for the establishment of several commercial ventures in the village, and George Ela, who the township of Ela was named after. In the 1830s and 1840s the area saw an influx of New England farmers, with German immigrants beginning their relocation to the area at around the middle of the century. In the 19th century Lake Zurich was actually known under the name of Lake Cedar. Lake Zurich was incorporated as a village on September 19th 1896 and while the railroad came to the village in 1910, it shut down just ten years later; largely as a result of this the village remained mainly a farming community. The highway system began to arrive in the form of Rand Road (US Route Road 12) in 1922, followed in 1927 by Half Day Road (Illinois Route 22), which saw the establishment of Lake Zurich as a very convenient summer resort. In the 1950s, housing development began in the area and resulted in an expansion of the population in the second half of last century.
There are a number of public schools in and around Lake Zurich, including elementary schools such as Isaac Fox, Seth Paine, May Whitney, Sarah Adams and Spencer Loomis. The middle schools in the area are Lake Zurich Middle School South and Lake Zurich Middle School North, and there is just the one high school in the form of Lake Zurich High School.
Lance Grooms