Taxi from Lake Zurich to O’Hare Airport

The Lake a Spiritualist Banker Renamed After Switzerland

Lake Zurich’s own lake wasn’t always called Lake Zurich. European-American settlement here began in the 1830s, and the natural glacial lake at the center of town — formed roughly 12,000 years ago and originally known as Cedar Lake — got its new name from one of the village’s most unusual founders: Seth Paine, a Vermont-born settler who arrived in Illinois “without a penny” in 1834 and opened the Union Store here in 1841. Paine thought “Cedar Lake” sounded “stiff and plain,” so he renamed it after the lake in Zurich, Switzerland, for what he called its “noble, classical style.”

Paine was no ordinary shopkeeper. He was active in the Underground Railroad across Lake County, later worked as a Pinkerton Agency operative, and in Chicago he founded an unusual institution called the “Spirit Bank” — a bank where in-house spiritualist mediums were consulted on loan decisions. It didn’t last, but by 1867 Paine had also opened “The Woman’s Home” in Chicago, a shelter that housed well over a hundred women at a time into the early 1890s.

The village formally incorporated on September 29, 1896, and the Swiss name eventually became more than a historical footnote: starting in the 1960s, the village began actively encouraging Alpine-chalet architecture downtown, a civic choice that produced a real cluster of Swiss-style buildings still visible today — a 20th-century town literally building its way into matching a name an eccentric 19th-century banker picked on a whim.