The Colony: The history, families, society, architecture, and economics of a 1908 traditional American Cottage Row

By Hayward Draper

This book is the first to explore the history of a 1908 communal Cottage Row called The Colony, and also the nearby 1889 summer resort called Fountain Point. This history directly concerns Lake Leelanau, Michigan, but it also reflects major social and economic changes shared with many other parts of the United States due to the growth in the late 19th century of vacationing as a culmination of the Industrial Revolution.
We explore these issues by telling the stories of the six families who joined The Colony, and other families who then built summer cottages nearby. They ran the gamut from a retired widow and a traveling salesman, to a distinguished physician, to two wealthy owners of the Ohio company that first invented and sold KitchenAid appliances.
Hayward Draper’s meticulous unfolding of the history of The Colony not only sheds light on the era’s economic history but also encourages readers to explore the histories of their own idyllic vacation spots, including several he mentions created by members of the African American community. Draper’s book is both a fascinating read and a major contribution to scholarship. -Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Harvard University
Draper weaves together interesting stories of a diverse cast of characters with factual and charming appeal. This original research sheds new light on the history of Lake Leelanau, Fountain Point, and the interplay between original settler families and newly arriving vacationers. Since it ties this in with similar developments across America in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, it merits reading by anyone. -Kim Kelderhouse Director, Leelanau Historical Society

• Language: English
• Publisher: Dorrance Publishing Company
• Release date: May 21, 2024
• ISBN: 9798890279262

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About the Author

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Hayward Draper graduated from Yale University in 1971 with honors in History, and then was appointed a Carnegie Teaching Fellow in History at Yale Graduate School. He later received his law degree from Harvard and spent most of his career as a litigation attorney in Des Moines, Iowa, and later also Traverse City, Michigan. He has vacationed with his family in Leelanau County since 1978 and now lives there in a new home a few houses north of The Colony. He also has served as a Trustee and Treasurer of the Leelanau Historical Society.

The Colony

INTRODUCTION

This is the story of a traditional American Cottage Row dating from 1908 and called The Colony, located across from the historic 1889 Fountain Point Resort on South Lake Leelanau in northern Michigan. The Colony is one of a very small number of traditional Cottage Rows left in the United States where original buildings still remain largely intact and unchanged and are still being used. The history of both Fountain Point and The Colony thus provides us with a window on how middle class Americans lived in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

This Cottage Row also tells a story about some particular families who helped settle Ohio in the early nineteenth century, and prospered in business, trades, and professions. They then helped to develop in northern Michigan a new type of hybrid economy that replaced the solely extractive and agricultural worlds that had previously existed there. The same thing happened around this same time in many other scenic areas in the United States, so the stories of these families illustrate the early roots of America’s nationwide transition to a modern, service economy.

Like two other vacation venues of that era, Grand Hotels and Summer Camps, Cottage Rows have largely disappeared. Even the few that survive no longer function in the communal fashion they originally did. Their design no longer fit with how Americans had begun to vacation by World War II, with the coming of paved highways and modern indoor bathrooms, and especially with the development and acceptance of the modern kitchen appliances that rendered obsolete the communal kitchens and dining facilities that were the reason old Cottage Rows were built in the first place.

Ironically, this particular Cottage Row, and then the separate line of family vacation cottages that were built just north of it in the 1920s, included owners of one of the companies that developed the very same appliances that caused the disappearance of so many of the other Cottage Rows now lost to history.

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(map by Mike Draper)

I. THE SETTING (2022)

Lake Leelanau is a twenty-one-mile-long lake running down the middle of a peninsula to the west and north of Traverse City, Michigan, creating the Grand Traverse Bay. It is comprised of a South Lake Leelanau and a North Lake Leelanau, with a Narrows connecting them at a village that is today called Lake Leelanau, but once was called Provemont. The North Lake then empties over a dam into Lake Michigan at a small town called Leland, and along the peninsula’s southwestern shore one finds the Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore. A somewhat mirror image of Leelanau County is found across Lake Michigan in Door County, Wisconsin, which creates Green Bay.

The southwest corner of South Lake Leelanau is fed by a very large wetland through which winds the Cedar River, a favorite place for kayakers. But if you then paddle your kayak two miles along the southern shore of this lake, you will find a small boat launch site, with a couple of small docks, and a single gas pump for boats to use, and a Tiki bar where you can get a sandwich and a drink. Back around 1900, this was the site of a small train station on a line running from Manistee to Traverse City and was known as Fouch.

Driving a pontoon boat north from Fouch, you may notice that the water is unusually clear, and in the early mornings and evenings you likely will see quite a few fishermen because the lake has always been known for its good fishing. What you see on both sides of the lake is heavily wooded land, some swampy, but most now containing homes, each with a hundred feet or so of frontage and its own dock. A few are old-style summer cottages, but most are post-World War II or more recent, newer-style construction suitable for year-round use. Hidden away in the trees behind the houses on each side of the lake are very nice, paved roads. And across those roads you see the land slope quickly up to wooded ridges running the full length of the South Lake.

If one ventured inland up over these ridges, one would find more homes, some on the ridge with lake views, but also farms with groves of cherry trees, and occasionally some apples, peaches, and pears. One would find some fine vineyards with wineries that cater to the tourists who now flock to Leelanau County. Towns like Leland, Lake Leelanau, Suttons Bay, Northport, and Glen Arbor are filled with restaurants and shops for summer people and retirees. The same summer people and retirees also support a busy local construction industry and many other service businesses.

Part way up the South Lake, on the east shore, you pass a public park and boat access called Bingham. Further along, on the west side, you spot a silo marking one of the few remaining livestock farms, with cattle grazing in some fields that lack the trees covering the other properties. A bit further north, the lake begins to narrow where a small peninsula juts out from the east, which is called Fountain Point. There you see something very different; namely, a large, white, three-story Victorian building with a red roof, surrounded by small, white cottages, also with red roofs, and also seemingly dating back many years. In front of this Fountain Point Resort is a good-sized beach with an enormous boathouse at one end, a large dock in the middle, and racks of rowing shells at the other end. The big lawn between the main building and the beach is where concerts and wedding receptions are now held. And at the southern edge of this lawn is the spraying fountain created by a 160-year-old artesian well that gives the location its name.

When you tie up your boat to the dock at Fountain Point, and go up and sit on the white wicker couch on the big open porch of the main building there, you see in the sunlight directly across the lake from you a much smaller beach with a dock and white boathouse out at the end of the dock. Next to that beach is a yellow house of a traditional 1920s summer cottage style, but updated, that was originally built by Frank Meeker, about whom you’ll hear more later. South of the Meeker house you can see (especially when the leaves are off the trees) a row of summer cottages, four of which are much smaller than the typical lakefront homes you have admired from your boat, and which also are of a style that is more consistent with the style of cottages at Fountain Point than the newer, post-World War II summer homes you have been driving by to get here. It is this group of cottages, all built at the same time around 1908 as a communal Cottage Row, and later referred to by its owners as The Colony, that will be the focus of our story.

Leaving the Fountain Point dock, you cross the three hundred feet or so to that white boathouse just north of The Colony, slowly moving north through a short No Wake zone along a line of eight homes, most dating from the 1920s, with their own boathouses. Speeding up, it takes just two minutes to power past St. Mary’s Church and enter the Narrows, traveling under a concrete highway bridge, past a wine-tasting establishment and the dock for the village of Lake Leelanau, and then through an area of reeds and waterlilies owned by a nature conservancy. The two beaver lodges are well hidden, but a large swans’ nest isn’t.

A quick run across North Lake Leelanau looks a lot like the South Lake, although there are some larger, more expensive homes here. You then enter the Leland River, tightly lined with new homes, passing a large shed at Stander Marine where you see a row of classic, wooden Chris Craft and Gar Wood boats. At the last turn sits the Riverside Inn, next to which the old steam ferry stopped in 1900 to unload passengers it had picked up at the train station in Fouch. So you tie up at the town dock there, walking past the waterfall over the Leland dam to the popular tourist destination known as Fishtown, with shops now filling the refurbished rough shanties that commercial fishermen had built in the early twentieth century. Wide, sandy beaches stretch north and south from here along Lake Michigan, attracting families, kite-boarders, and sun-bathers.

From what you’ve seen, you might assume that the development of this hybrid economy, which includes an active agricultural base but appears driven financially more by summer people, tourists, and retirees, was something that inevitably came about due to the natural beauty of this Lake Leelanau, with its clear water and hilly and wooded shores, and also the ocean-like Lake Michigan, with its sand beaches and dunes, both of them attracting vacationers from around the Midwest who can easily drive up from Cincinnati, Columbus, Louisville, Indianapolis, Detroit, or Chicago in a day. But as we explore the history of the Cottage Row known as The Colony, we’ll see that this development was not at all inevitable.

Back in 1900 to 1930, when its economy was primarily agricultural, Leelanau County lost over twenty percent of its population. Not long before that, many portions of it were not somewhere people from other places would have been able to visit, or would have wanted to visit even if they could, much less build summer homes and retire. At one point, Leland seemed to be trying to develop into somewhere more like Erie, Pennsylvania, or Gary, Indiana, with a ninety-foot-tall iron smelter on the Lake Michigan waterfront, supported by a series of charcoal kilns by the Narrows and in Leland itself, and active, hardwood logging operations around both lakes to feed those smokey kilns.

So, let’s start with a bit of historical background. First on Ohio, where the bulk of Fountain Point and Colony residents came from. Then on to the coming of early white settlers to the Lake Leelanau area, and their efforts in the late nineteenth century to industrialize it. And finally, some history on how and why early, middle class vacationers, like the six families who created The Colony, first began to come to Leelanau and eventually helped transform it into something very unlike those Midwest industrial areas that earlier civic and business leaders had wanted so much to emulate.

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Lake Michigan beach at Leland.

Photograph by Meggen Watt

II. THE OHIOANS

When the Peace of Paris ended the American Revolutionary War in 1783, the leaders of the new republic insisted that England include for their new country all land England held east of the Mississippi