2 posts tagged “bay view”

The woods of Bay View now has a good set of trails (see the bottom of this page) but when I was growing up during the 1960's it had only one trail known as the Old Indian Trail (the square dots but only that part on the northern ridge). When growing up I was not sure whether this trail really was the remains of a Native American trail or not. But some years ago I did happen to see a map in either a book or a museum that showed the Indian trails of northern Michigan and sure enough this trial was on it. These trails generally paralleled the shores of the Great Lakes and its bays. The part in Bay View was the section that went around Little Traverse Bay.

The Native Americans held title to the land around Little Traverse Bay until around 1870 which was quite late for any land east of the Mississippi River. The logging companies were first to exploit the land by lumbering near the shores including the land on which Bay View now stands. But it was not a clear cut destructive logging so it seems to have left the Indian Trail intact. After Bay View was founded in 1875 no more logging happened in the Bay View woods except for a small section around 1960 when the Association apparently needed the money. So the woods is now a climax forest and as long as Bay View survives it will never be developed. It is a wonderful woods.

Cottages and other development around the Great Lakes seem to have destroyed most of these original trails making the short section in Bay View something special. The photo at the far right shows the beginning of the trail looking back at a row of cottages that destroyed the trail further westward. Beyond those will be the town of Petoskey.

The trail ends at Division road at the end of Bay View property shown above. When young my brothers and I crossed the road to see if the trail continued on. It does not so we assume it turned towards the Bay here. Later when roads were constructed the builders chose the easiest path and simply used the Indian Trail.

Some of my ancestors were the first pioneers to settle the land around Walloon Lake just south of Little Traverse Bay after the Native Americans lost title to the land and the railroad was built. My great great grandfather (who actually came from Ontario, Canada) sold some of his farm land on the shore of Walloon lake to a family from Chicago known to history as the Hemmingways. My grandfather knew Ernest Hemmingway when he was growing up.

Every year I and my family go spend a week in Bay View, Michigan at my parent's cottage with my parents. This cottage was purchased by my grandparent's in 1960 as a $4,000 fixer-upper. My grandfather was a Methodist minister who was raised on a farm near-by so this was his summer retirement home. It was also a great vacation when I was young. Yet now this cottage is more than a vacation spot, it is a family place where-in resides memories of long ago. Family heirlooms are here such as my great-grandparent's bed, the bed where my grandmother was born. So in a time of constant change this place of stability and continuity.

Bay View was founded in 1875 as a Methodist summer meeting camp with the goal of combining educational and spiritual self-improvement with a vacation in what became known as the  Chautauqua movement. Bay View continues this tradition today and it has now become a National Historic Landmark because of that and because of its fantastic Queen Ann buildings. Speakers still come in to give lectures every day of the week on subjects ranging from religion, to constitutional law, to current events. Members offer classes to each other based upon what they know.

So originally vacationers camped in tents after arriving via train.  They would listen to lectures on a sloping hill with the lecturer giving the lecture from the speakers stand, the first building put up in the Association. Soon the tents gave way to shacks which gave way to regular summer cottages. Even when I was growing up (1960's) the water pipes were strung along the top of the ground instead of buried. Now the cottages keep on getting larger as families add to them so everyone in the extended family can visit.

As a part of spiritual growth the arts have always been a big part of Bay View. Walking through he central part of Bay View known as the campus one always here music or singing being practiced in one the large Queen Ann style buildings. A concert is given every week and a musical play is put on every year. This year it was Roger's and Hammerstein's Carousel although it was put on the week after we were there. The week we were their the concert was a special one in that the musician were not from the music summer school but were brought in. It was a jazz concert and Frank Sinatra tribute show.

While technically fantastic I did not like this style of improvisational or contemporary jazz. It had no melody at all and after a while it just sounded noisy.  My father left at intermission to go watch a ball game and my son went with him to play a computer game. The rest of us stuck it out. The Frank Sinatra part was OK as he sang a lot of his hits. I must be getting old since in my younger days I would have died before going to a Sinatra concert. One of my fondest memories of a Bay View concert was listening to a married couple play on a rare dual grand piano who were instructors at the music school there. The notes were so fast and close together that when I closed my eyes I could imagine that the sound was coming from a violin. Simply amazing!

Bay View has a wonderful woods (I will talk about that in a later post) and a nice waterfront on Little Traverse Bay. For those of you who have never experienced the Great Lakes they are like a fresh water ocean. I learned to sail in the sunfish fleet that is popular here. Although when the association put restrictions on sailing range for a few years we ignored it since my bother and I fancied ourselves explorers instead of racers and were not fond of rules catering to the timid and unskilled. We took rather long trips for such a small boat. Despite sailing in waves that were over our heads while sitting down on the boat I never had the boat tip over accidentally. (The boats are unsinkable and one does have to tip one over on purpose in order to learn how to right it. And yes Lake Michigan water is cold!)

Every week we take one day trip to one of the many sites in northern Michigan. This year it was Mackinaw City and Mackinac Island. New for us in Mackinaw City since our last visit was a nice enclosed shopping plaza called Mackinaw Crossings. It had enough variety to keep everyone interested, even me! My favorite shop was a fantasy / medieval shop called Enchanted Knights where my son got a really nice wooden long sword and I got a book on English Longbowmen. I was hoping to find a sweatshirt with a dragon theme but they did not have any sweatshirts at all which is very strange given the cool temperatures this place usually has. To top off the experience they had a pizza buffet for lunch. A shopping center just doesn't get any better than that.

Also new was the retired Great Lakes icebreaker Mackinaw which we toured. It is wide for its length giving the captain a luxurious entertainment area (see photo). It sides were and inch and a quarter of steel.

From Mackinaw City we took a ferry to Mackinac Island. This place does not allow cars which gives it a lot of charm and smells from the horses. This year we took a horse tour of the island since the last time we were there we visited the fort. The island is famous for its fudge so I just had to get some.

One afternoon we went to Petoskey  Beach State Park for a picnic. This is at the end of Little Traverse Bay where the sand piles up. But this year it had an algae collection twice as large as I had ever seen it. Usually algae and sea (Lake?) weed blow in during a storm and the area had a storm the previous week but it has never been this large. Fertilizer runoff that grows this stuffs excessively seems to be a growing problem in the Great Lakes.