Lake Ivanhoe, WI

Lake Ivanhoe is a Walworth County CDP in the Town of Bloomfield, but its history reaches back to a much bigger question than a lake address. In 1926, Jeremiah Brumfield, Frank Anglin, and Bradford Watson bought an 83-acre farm on Ryan Lake to create a resort community for middle-class Black Chicagoans. They were looking for a place where Black families could vacation and build community while white resorts shut them out. A white real-estate agent, Ivan Bell, brokered the deal, and the new community took his name.

That origin makes Lake Ivanhoe one of Wisconsin's important Black-founded places. The lake, streets, and homes carry a story of recreation, migration, investment, and self-determination. Travel Wisconsin still presents the community as a destination with early African American heritage, and the Pomeroy Foundation marker gives the founding story a public place in the landscape. Lake Geneva is about five miles west, while Walworth County handles the broader services around Bloomfield. Lake Ivanhoe's local scoop is in the name's backstory: a resort made by Chicagoans who decided to create the welcome they were denied elsewhere.