Bay View: A Victorian Summer Utopia on Lake Michigan

Just north of Petoskey, tucked above the blue curve of Little Traverse Bay, sits one of the strangest and most intact communities in the American Midwest: more than four hundred Victorian cottages with gingerbread trim and wraparound porches, jammed together on narrow lanes above the water, occupied every summer since eighteen seventy-six.

The Bay View Association was the dream of a group of Michigan Methodists who gathered in Jackson in September of eighteen seventy-five and decided they wanted a summer community devoted, as they put it, to intellectual and scientific culture and the promotion of religion and morality. They found a bluff above the bay, secured the land with help from the Grand Rapids and Indiana Railroad, and held their first six-day camp meeting in the summer of eighteen seventy-six. Within eleven years, about two hundred cottages had gone up, along with a chapel and a hotel.

Bay View was modeled on the original Chautauqua in New York, the great American experiment in adult education through summer gatherings. Families came for weeks at a time to hear lectures, attend concerts, and enroll in classes. The movement spawned dozens of similar communities across the country in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Most have closed. Bay View remains, one of the finest survivors.

The community was designated a National Historic Landmark in nineteen eighty-seven, recognized precisely because it still functions as its founders intended: a privately managed association where families return summer after summer to the same cottage their grandparents owned, attending the same kinds of programs the Methodists dreamed up in Jackson a century and a half ago.

Ernest Hemingway knew this place. His family summered on nearby Walloon Lake, and young Ernest moved through Bay View as a teenager, staying in a rooming house there, absorbing a northern Michigan that would later surface in his Nick Adams stories. The bay views that inspired the community's name, and the particular quality of late-afternoon light over the water, show up in his early fiction in ways the reader might not immediately recognize.