The former Estelle Walgreen estate, located in Lake Forest

LAKE FOREST LIST $2.375 MILLION  SALE $1.9 MILLION

Estelle Walgreen, who attracted a flurry of attention with her decision to keep potbellied pigs on her Lake Forest estate, has lost the property in foreclosure. It was sold in December for $1.9 million, or about 58 percent of the $3.3 million Walgreen paid for the place in March 2006.

Connected to the road by a stone bridge, the 2.25-acre property encompasses both wooded tableland and scenic ravine slopes. Fronted by a white-pillared portico, the 12-room house was built in 1903 from a design by the architect James Gamble Rogers. Five years ago, Walgreen moved there with her pet pigs from the West Lake Forest estate where she had lived since 1991, both before and after her divorce from Charles Walgreen, the great-grandson of the drugstore company’s founder. Her desire to keep her porcine pets on the property caused consternation among her blue-blooded neighbors. (Two of the pigs have since died, and at last report, the third resides in a West Virginia swine sanctuary.)

Walgreen’s lender began foreclosure proceedings in December 2008, according to the Lake County Recorder of Deeds. In August 2010, Deborah Fischer, a Koenig & Strey Real Living agent, got the listing, and by early October the house was under contract. The deal closed in mid-December. Fischer would not identify the buyers, whose names have not appeared in public records.  Walgreen, the editorial director of the Hispanically Speaking News website, did not respond to a request for comment.

 

Photograph: Dennis Rodkin