Our Founders were Inspired by the Free Body Culture movement

The Lake O’ The Woods Club was founded in 1933 by a small group of intrepid nudists from Chicago as an offshoot of a movement that continues to this day in Germany called “Freikörperkultur” (FKK) or Free Body Culture, which advocates social and outdoor recreational nudity as a good-heath practice. The nudist culture at Lake O’ The Woods remains to this day about celebrating the body unencumbered by clothes, in nature and sunlight.  FKK is based on an attitude towards life where the naked body is not a source of shame, and does not involve sexuality.

The founding members of Lake O' The Woods acquired Sager’s Lake and the surrounding acreage from the Sager family in 1933, and created what is now the second oldest nudist club in the country. A daughter of one of the founders reportedly said “It’s such a pretty lake o’ the woods”. The name stuck.

The Valparaiso Moraine

The hilly and somewhat rugged landscape in and around Valparaiso, Indiana, so different from the rest of northern Indiana, was formed during the last ice age 20,000 years ago, at the edge of the great Laurentide Ice Sheet.  The ice sheet carried rocks and debris from far to the north and deposited it in a wide arc, like a halo around the southern tip of Lake Michigan, called the Valparaiso Moraine.  While hiking around Sager’s Lake on the Circle Trail you’ll experience the natural untouched terrain first hand.

The Sager Family

Before it was Lake O’ The Woods, the land was cleared for farming by the Sager family in the 1890s, who also built the earthen dam that created “Sager’s Lake”.  The dam was used to drive a sawmill, then to grind flour. Before electricity, huge ice blocks were cut from the lake and used to keep ice-boxes — early refrigerators — cold. The lake was a popular picnic, boating and swimming spot for locals at the beginning of the 20th century. Today, a hundred years later, the lake and forest are full of wildlife, abounding with fish, deer, foxes, turtles, owls, herons, hawks, geese, many kinds of birds, chipmunks, beavers, mink, and occasionally, even mosquitos have been sighted.