Bay View: A Victorian Chautauqua on the Bluff
Near Petoskey, Michigan
Just east of downtown, tucked into wooded terraces above the bay, stands one of the best preserved Victorian resort communities in America. Bay View was founded in eighteen seventy-five by Michigan Methodists as a summer camp meeting, a place, in their own words, for scientific and intellectual culture and for the promotion of religion and morality. Families first pitched tents, then built ornate gingerbread cottages, and today roughly four hundred forty of them still cluster on the hillside, along with about thirty community buildings.
In eighteen eighty-six Bay View adopted the Chautauqua program, part of a national movement that brought lectures, music, and adult education to summer resorts. A summer university opened the following year. Generations came for the concerts, sermons, and classes, arriving by train and steamship in the golden age of the fresh air resort.
Because it preserves two distinctly American traditions, the Methodist camp meeting and the independent Chautauqua, Bay View was designated a National Historic Landmark in nineteen eighty-seven. It still runs a full summer season of music, theater, lectures, and worship. Walking its shaded lanes among the painted cottages feels like stepping straight into the eighteen eighties.
