Sunnyside Farm got its start around 1870, when the original 609 acres was purchased by General John McDonald and his wife, Mary. They soon built a large and elegant home and estate on the site, which included stock barns, stables, granaries, a creamery, a blacksmith shop, a large carriage house and other outbuildings. The entire complex was known as Sunnyside Stock Farm.

John McDonald had been a boyhood friend of Ulysses S. Grant. During the Civil War McDonald became a colonel, and then a brigadier general by President Abraham Lincoln, and at times worked closely with General Grant. After Grant was elected president in 1868, McDonald joined his administration – originally as a “claim agent” and then soon as “Supervisor of the Internal Revenue Service for the western district of the US.”

During that time, in what became known as The Whiskey Ring bribery scandal, it is said that he and a few other tax men swindled “between three and four million dollars” from the federal government. He
eventually got caught, and was imprisoned after a guilty verdict in November of 1875. Just over a year later he was pardoned by President Grant (January 1877) and he soon left Washington DC. President Ulysses S. Grant was said to have visited McDonald on several occasions in Green Lake at Sunnyside Farm.

Following marital problems and scandals, the McDonalds divorced about 1878. The farm was sold in 1879 to Omar Rosenkrans of Milwaukee, then sold to the Trimborn family in 1881. In 1886 it was purchased by George Meacham then sold to O.E. Meyer in 1895. At the time of that sale, Sunnyside Farm stretched from the far edge of Silver Creek to the Inlet on the south end and to the corner of Sunnyside Road and County A on the north side and included the Sunny Side Creamery Company. The property at the time was still at least 475 acres.

Mr. Meyer envisioned big profits from developing summer cottages on the east end of the lake to be laid out to the west side of Inlet Road. He built his first one in 1901, sold to Henry Allen for $1,000, materials included. Meyer’s development along the east shore included the Terrace Casino, which burned in the early 1900’s. The remainder of the farm was put up for sale and purchased by the Formiller family and eventually owned by the A.C. Carver family, and finally Kopplin and Kinas in 1957, who with Carl Diedrich, formed the Wisconsin Realty Development Corporation for the purpose of developing Sunnyside.

Most of the buildings are gone from the original Sunnyside Farm, though foundations remain. The original house had not been kept up and was torn down in 1959, deemed unsafe. The large barn burned as a result of arson in the 1970’s