    
Date Designated: October 18, 1968
Location: Walloon Lake (Emmet County) |
The Ernest Hemingway Cottage, also known as Windemere, was the boyhood summer home of author Ernest Hemingway.
Windemere sits on the shores of Walloon Lake outside of Petoskey Michigan. It was and is the summer home of the Hemingway family (still owned by Ernest’s nephew/godson). The Hemingway’s first came to Walloon lake in 1898 and before the summer was over they purchased a piece of property consisting of 4 lots (1 acre) on the north shore, with birches & cedars surrounding the white sandy beach that formed a bay. Here they built Windemere cottage.
Lumbering camps abounded in the area (it was lumber from here that helped rebuild Chicago after the great fire), and it had an Indian village. Many of Hemingway’s Nick Adams stories are filled with tales gathered here and in the neighboring towns.
Although he spent most of his formative years in his hometown of Oak Park, Illinois, every summer the Hemingway family trekked north to their Walloon Lake cottage, a simple twenty-foot-by-forty-foot cabin built in 1899 by Hemingway's father. The author’s mother named it Windemere. This was where Hemingway learned to fish and hunt and have a good time. Because he knew and loved the area so well, it became the setting for much of his fiction, including most of the autobiographical Nick Adams stories as well as The Torrents of Spring, Hemingway’s early novel set in Petoskey.
The Hemingway’s took the lake steamer State of Ohio from Chicago to Harbor Springs (a voyage that would take the Hemingway’s some 32 hours), then the train to Petoskey where they switched railway cars for Walloon Lake, and then the little lake steamer up the lake to Windemere.
As the family grew so did Windemere. The Hemingway’s added an out building for bedrooms. After all, with six children, assorted playmates, the cook and mother and father Hemingway, the two bedrooms in the cottage didn’t accommodate the tribe, especially as the largest bedroom, which was Grace and Clarence’s was only 8’x12’, with the other being 8x10. Until the outbuilding was erected, the family slept on the two window seats on either side of the fireplace, and the floor, and at times in a tent pitched next to the cottage.
Although Windemere is closed to the public, it is well maintained. It is the only Hemingway residence that is still owned by a family member. The white exterior paint looks as if it was just done yesterday, as does the green shingled roof. Renovations are an on-going thing. The front of the cottage faces Walloon Lake (sometimes called Bear Lake).
Walloon Lake was originally named Talcott. As the story goes, a local butcher, J. R. Haas, saw the name Walloon Lake on an old railroad map and tried to discover the history behind the name. It is thought that a group of Walloons from Belgium settled the land at the north end of the lake, which was then called Bear Lake. No trace of this settlement has ever been found. |