Ingleside is an unincorporated community on the shores of Wooster Lake in Grant Township, Lake County — and over a century ago, its quiet shoreline was the site of one of Illinois’s more unusual social experiments. In 1905, Jacob Beilhart moved his Spirit Fruit Society — a small communal group built around shared property and simple living — onto a 90-acre lakefront farm here. Members hand-built a 32-room concrete-block “temple” with a dining hall large enough for 100 guests, raising crops and livestock to support themselves while welcoming curious visitors from Chicago.

The community drew attention from well-known Chicago figures of the era, including attorney Clarence Darrow and reformer Emma Goldman, who came to see the experiment in cooperative living firsthand. After Beilhart’s death in 1908, he was buried — fittingly, given the group’s belief in simplicity — in an unmarked grave overlooking the lake he’d chosen as home. The Society relocated west in 1915, but Beilhart’s grave remains at the site today, a quiet historical footnote on a lake now surrounded by homes rather than hand-built dormitories.