This is the first certificate for shares of "Capital Stock" issued by the February 28, 1856-organized Lake Forest Association, a Chicago-based body, signed by the trustees and issued to "Franklin Ripley Jr." The shares had a face value of $500 each, with payment made here of $250, with three future installments--at six months, twelve and eighteen months, with interest. The certificate is signed in 1856 by H[iram] F[oote] Mather, chair of the trustees; David J. Lake; S[ylvester] Lind; E. H. Aiken; and Peter Page. By September 24, 1857, Franklin Ripley was deceased, and his son, Christian F., transferred the shares to A. G. Hammond, at Chicago. Hammond, acting as atty... for C. Ripley, who in turn, on July 23, 1857, surrendered the certificate back to the Assn. in exchange for two lots in the soon to be registered in Waukegan, IL, plan: numbers 8 and 230. Today Lot 8 is the location of Sheridan School, Sheridan Road and Spruce Ave.; today Lot 230 is the northeast corner of Washington and Rosemary Roads.

Franklin Ripley, Jr. (1824-1856) was born in Greenfield, MA, on January 24, 1824. He was an Amherst College graduate (as were the early staff members of Lind University's Lake Forest Academy and collegiate program).  Admitted to the bar, he then moved to Milwaukee, WI. (See Francis McGee Thompson, History of Greenfield... v.2, 821).   

Lake Forest University in 1878 was the successor to the the Lake Forest Association, which ceased operations then.  The University, known after 1903 as Lake Forest College, remained chartered as such until 1965, when the institution was re-chartered as Lake Forest College. The archives of the Association have been in he hands of the institution since 1878. The main work of the Association--selling shares to raise funds, acquiring the land, commssioning the plan from Almerin Hotchkiss, surveying this in detail to create lots, excvhanging the lots for the shares, and making initial improvments-- mostly took place between 1856 and  1862.  Government of the town was separate from the "development" and was organized as a village in 1859 and then formally as a City under state charter in 1861. Interestingly, though, the Rev. Robert W. Patterson was an organizer of the Association with the early meetings in the Second Presbyterian Church of Chicago, where he was pastor.  He then was president of Lake Forest Unversity, so named after 1865, from 1875 to march 1878.  He may have held these archives unofficially  and transferred them in 1878--in the year he gave up the institution's presidency and also the year its first masonry (fireproof) building was constructed, now Young Hall, Middle Campus.  

For more about the origins of Lake Forest and of Lake Forest Colelge, see the first chapter of Franz Schulze's Thirty Miles North: A History of Lake Forest College, Its Town and Its City of Chicago (2000).