For thousands of years, people were drawn to this area by its rich natural resources, unusual topography, nearby wetlands, and mineral springs. As the last glaciers retreated 10,000 years ago, Paleo-Indians came to hunt mastodons and other megafauna, and after the mastodon era ended, successive Native American groups continued moving through the area to hunt and gather in the wetlands. When European settlers arrived in 1834, they found a large band of Pottawatomie camped in what is now Churchill Woods Forest Preserve. The settlement later known as Stacy's Corners attracted extended families from the east, small businesses grew, and local young men served in the Union Army during the Civil War and returned home if they survived. In 1892, local businessmen formed the Prospect Park Improvement Association and created Lake Ellyn by damming two streams and an artesian spring in hopes of drawing more people to town. They also planned a luxury hotel on the eastern ridge above the lake, but the stock market crash of 1893 and the five-year depression that followed crippled the venture from the beginning, forcing plans for the Glen Ellyn Hotel and Springs to be reduced from a heated brick building to an unheated lumber structure. Developers broke ground in 1893 on the 100-room Hotel Glen Ellyn, whose landscaped grounds included walkways, gardens, and fountains, and by 1896 surrounding lots were offered for sale with promises of access to the park, lake, and mineral springs, though parcels nearest the lake did not sell. For a few years, the hotel was a popular destination where visitors enjoyed the area's beauty and the five mineral springs north of the lake, boating, fishing, dancing on an open-air floor, carriage rides, drinking from the springs, and bathing in healing mud. During its 12-year existence, the hotel passed through a series of operators and uses, including private management, a summer home for a Chicago club, a health clinic rented by St. Luke's Society, Ruskin College from Missouri, and a free hospital run by the Chicago Tribune Company, before standing vacant in 1906. On May 3, 1906, lightning struck the empty wooden hotel during a thunderstorm, and despite efforts by townspeople who rushed to help, the building burned to the ground in less than two hours with no casualties, though it was a total loss because its insurance had not been paid. In 1900, Madame Emily Reick and her husband moved their brothel from downtown Chicago to Glen Ellyn after quietly buying lots east of the lake and west of Riford Road, establishing it in a remodeled mansion northeast of the lake near the hotel and later adding a second guest house called Venusberg; in 1911, the Temperance Movement shut down the town's taverns and ended the brothel. In 1919, the lake and the southern portion of the land were purchased by referendum through the newly formed high school district, the Glen Ellyn Park Board was created, and three years later the Glenbard High School District transferred supervision of the lake and much adjoining property to the Park Board. Because much of the land near the lake never sold, a beautiful 25-acre park exists there today.