Gander Mountain once had relay tower
The highest natural elevation in Lake County is located within the 300-acre Gander Mountain Forest Preserve near Spring Grove.
The site was created by the retreating Laurentide glacier from the last Ice Age, 10,000 to 12,000 years ago. The glacier once covered 5 million square miles from Hudson Bay in northern Canada to New England and across the upper Midwestern states. Ice as much as a quarter-mile thick covered most of Illinois.
The glacier affected the land around us, including the noted landmark of Gander Mountain, a kame terrace formed by melting ice at the edge of the glacier depositing sand, gravel and boulders. The location affords incredible views of the landscape for miles around.
This high point was utilized in 1948, when AT&T Communications constructed a television relay tower on this site. Through the 1950s, AT&T built relay towers across the country, including the one at Gander Mountain, and one in Lake Zurich. The towers provided a one-way television route from Chicago to Milwaukee, and U.S. long distance telephone service.
The concrete towers built in Lake County resembled farm silos with their circular, tapered shape. AT&T used this design for only six of its towers, perhaps initially sympathetic to the farm country where they were built.
When the towers were built, they would have stood prominently on the landscape, surrounded mostly by farm country. The height of the towers was important for the microwave radio relay technology to transmit digital and analog signals between two locations on a line-of-sight radio path.
The Lake County towers were 101 feet tall overall. They had steel stairways alongside and within the silo to access the various floors. The sixth floor of each tower housed TE-1 microwave equipment. There were also antennas installed on the lower deck, one facing each direction of the route.
In 1961, one acre including the tower was donated by a developer to the Lake County Forest Preserves, and became the first parcel for Gander Mountain Forest Preserve.
By this time, the Gander Mountain tower was no longer in use by AT&T. Ham radio operators leased the use of the tower until the late 1980s, installing their own antennas on top. From the sixth floor you could see all the way to Waukegan.
The Gander Mountain tower was demolished around 1990 for safety reasons. The Lake Zurich tower still stands on the north side of Route 12 next to the Costco.