Band night at French’s Hotel, Eagle Lake

Edwardsburg, Mich. The band sits in a ring of folding chairs on the bare ground under the trees. The players wear peaked caps, their music is clipped to stands, and the trombones and the big bass drum stand out among the brass. A flag is strung on a line overhead. Around them the crowd stands close: men in shirtsleeves and straw hats, women in white, and in front one man grinning at the camera with a cigar in his teeth. Behind them are horses and a buggy, and motor cars with their tops up.

DocumentedThe words are written across the top of the card: “Band Concert, French’s Hotel, Eagle Lake, Mich.” It is a real-photo postcard of 1912, now in the David V. Tinder Collection at the University of Michigan. No photographer’s name appears on its face.

When this story first ran, we could not say who the French of French’s was, or when the hotel opened. Now we can. The hotel was built in 1906 by a farm family who met their guests at the train, grew their dinners, ran a grocery on the ground floor and kept a penny slot machine in the parlor. It stood for about eighty years, and the photographer who made the village’s best-known postcards photographed it twice.

A lake on the road from the train

DocumentedEagle Lake is one of the larger lakes of Cass County. Mathews’s county history of 1882 gives it 411 acres. It lies in the northeast of Ontwa Township, while the village of Edwardsburg lies in the township’s northwest.

DocumentedThe visitors came by rail. The Edwardsburg Chamber’s history says that the Peninsular Railroad, later the Grand Trunk, was completed in 1871 and that the village began to rebuild around it. A glass-plate photograph by George Andrus of the Edwardsburg Argus, now on the Cass County GenWeb site, is captioned: “Depot, Grand Trunk Railroad, built in 1872, photo in 1914.”

DocumentedThe village the visitors passed through was small and sober. The Chamber’s history describes an Edwardsburg of about 500 people with some twenty stores and shops: general, hardware, drug and grocery stores, milliners, furniture and shoe stores, blacksmith and harness shops, wagon makers, a livery stable, a grist mill on Davis Street and a lumber mill. There were no saloons. The first tavern license had been issued in 1830, but the Edwardsburg Reform Club later had taverns outlawed.

DocumentedEagle Lake is in Ontwa Township, Edwardsburg’s own. The village’s history, as the Edwardsburg Chamber tells it, says that in summer “city folks detrained in the village” and were “driven by horse and carriage to French’s Resort on Eagle Lake.”

French’s

The Edwardsburg Area History Museum has gathered the resort’s life in postcards, many of them provided by Floyd Jerdon of Dowagiac. Its gallery has French’s Landing about 1901 and in 1907, French’s Hotel in 1910 and 1911, another band concert at the resort in 1917, and “Hotel French’s, Eagle Lake Resort” still on a card of 1941. The Eagle Lake Sailing Club says it had its “early beginnings in 1936 at French’s Hotel.”

DocumentedThe gallery runs to more than a hundred cards. Among them are “French’s Landing, Eagle Lake Panorama, circa 1901,” “French’s Hotel Eagle Lake, 1910,” “French’s Eagle Lake House, 1913,” “French’s Eagle Lake Resort, 1923,” “French’s Hotel and Landing, 1930,” “French’s Cottages, 1939” and “Hotel French’s, Eagle Lake Resort, 1941.” The names shift from landing to house to hotel to resort, but the family name stays on every one.

Henry and Myrtle French

DocumentedThe fullest account of the hotel is a column by Jo-Ann Boepple in the Edwardsburg Argus of 18 August 2011, drawing on the book Reflections of Eagle Lake by Lenore Cassady, Melba Freeman and Norma Lu Mehan. It is plain on the founding: “The hotel was built by Henry and Myrtle French in 1906.” The same account had run in the paper in July 2009.

DocumentedIt stood on a hill on North Shore Drive, across the road from the lake: a white clapboard building with a grocery store, a dining room, a parlor and the kitchen on the ground floor, twelve to fifteen guest rooms upstairs, and a long front porch facing the water. Wooden steps and walkways led down across the road to the beach, where guests swam, fished, and swam out to a raft anchored offshore. Boats were kept for fishing.

DocumentedIt was a family business. The Frenches’ sons, Ford and Harry, met guests at the railroad depot, first with a horse and buggy and later with a motor car. Both sons married into the Barber family, Ford and Harry taking the sisters Katie and Gertrude, who worked at the hotel too. Harry and Gertrude’s daughter, Barbara, later worked in the grocery store.

DocumentedThe Frenches raised much of what their guests ate. Henry milked the cows and kept chickens, and sausage was made from the family’s own hogs. The store delivered groceries to the summer people around the lake, while two dairies, Wambaugh and Suabedissen, brought milk to the cottages.

DocumentedComfort was country comfort. There was no running water and no indoor plumbing. Two outhouses stood behind the hotel, one for men and one for women, with a low seat for children. Rooms had washbowls and chamber pots, and guests bathed in the lake. Slot machines were legal at the time, and a penny machine was a favorite.

ReadingPut that beside the postcard and the scene makes more sense. The men in shirtsleeves and the women in white are standing on the hotel’s own ground, likely among the guests and the cottagers it fed. The Frenches’ store and the band brought the lake’s summer people together on an ordinary evening. The motor cars at the back of the crowd are a reminder that by 1912 the sons’ buggy at the depot was already giving way to the automobile.

The photographer’s two cards

DocumentedIn 1910 the Elkhart photographer John Inbody, whose cards of Edwardsburg’s Elkhart Street, post office and school we have written about separately, came out to Eagle Lake. The Library of Congress holds two of his cards, both titled “French’s Hotel, Eagle Lake, Mich.,” both dated 1910 and marked “Copyright by Inbody.” They were registered under the copyright numbers J 143801 and J 144708 and came to the library by transfer from the Copyright Office.

DocumentedHe came at the height of a craze. A 2011 column in the Argus puts the peak years of postcard collecting at about 1907 to 1913, and notes that the Post Office reported 668 million postcards mailed in the year ending 30 June 1908.

ReadingInbody registered his three Edwardsburg views in 1910 under the numbers J 142861, J 142862 and J 142864. The French’s Hotel numbers run a little higher, which suggests he registered the hotel cards a little later. A photographer who sold cards to summer visitors had good reason to make them at the lake as well as in the village. We do not know whether the 1912 band card is also his: it bears no name.

Before the hotel

ReadingThe museum’s gallery includes “French’s Landing, Eagle Lake Panorama, circa 1901” and three cards of French’s Landing dated 1907. If the hotel was built in 1906, a card of about 1901 suggests that the French family had a landing on the lake, with boats for hire, before they had a hotel. Or the date on the panorama may be an estimate.

DocumentedThe gallery also shows that French’s was never alone. It has “Foster’s Eagle Lake House, 1907,” “Southworth Hotel, Eagle Lake, 1911,” “Culver’s Resort, Eagle Lake, 1956” and “Wendl’s Resort, Eagle Lake,” along with views of Willow Point, Oak Beach, Poplar Avenue in 1909, a cottage named Dreamwald, “Cottage No. 1 at Eagle Lake, 1909” and “Our Lady of the Lake Church, Eagle Lake.”

DocumentedSome of the cards were made close to home. In 2011 Boepple wrote that many of the museum’s postcards are believed to have been produced by the Andrus family, owners and publishers of the Argus, and that resort visitors often mailed cards of their cottages, sometimes marking their own windows. Among George Andrus’s glass plates on the GenWeb site are views of Eagle Lake with cottages and a houseboat.

The band

ReadingLook closely at the 1912 card. The players sit in a ring, with their music on stands, under trees rather than on a bandstand. The trombones and a big bass drum stand out. A flag on a line overhead is the only decoration. A concert like this needed no hall and no ticket: the hotel supplied a lawn and an audience, and the audience came by buggy and by car.

ReadingBand music was part of summer on the lakes of Cass County. By the Diamond Lake Association’s timeline, the Cassopolis band played on Diamond Lake Island at the Fourth of July of 1882, and in 1897 the steamer Cassopolis carried the Cassopolis band in that lake’s first Fourth of July boat parade. Edwardsburg had its own institutions to match: its newspaper, the Argus, had run since 1875, and its school fielded baseball teams that George Andrus photographed.

DocumentedFrench’s went on hiring bands. The museum’s gallery holds a second card, “French’s Resort Band Concert, 1917,” five years after ours.

The later years

DocumentedThe hotel outlived most of its rivals. The Eagle Lake Sailing Club says it had its “early beginnings in 1936 at French’s Hotel.” The museum’s cards of the late 1930s show the resort’s cottages, and the name “Hotel French’s, Eagle Lake Resort” is still on a card of 1941.

DocumentedThe club remembers those first seasons in a line from a member of about 1940, who said that sailing “helped to develop character and sportsmanship.” It grew, in its own words, into one of the premier sailing organizations in southwest Michigan and northern Indiana.

DocumentedBoepple’s account says the hotel was sold several times after 1943; the owners named include Vernon Stockbarger and Gerald Lane. In time the building was turned into apartments. It burned in 1987, after several small fires blamed on candles and a final large fire that could not be brought under control. “It was the end of an era,” Boepple wrote, “that provided great memories for many.”

A timeline

• 1871 The Peninsular Railroad, later the Grand Trunk, reaches Edwardsburg.
• 1872 The Grand Trunk depot at Edwardsburg is built, by the Andrus caption.
• 1882 Mathews gives Eagle Lake 411 acres.
• 19 years later
• c. 1901 A panorama card of French’s Landing.
• 1906 Henry and Myrtle French build the hotel on North Shore Drive.
• 1910 John Inbody photographs French’s Hotel twice.
• 1912 The band concert card.
• 1917 Another band concert at French’s Resort.
• 19 years later
• 1936 The Eagle Lake Sailing Club begins at French’s Hotel.
• 1941 “Hotel French’s, Eagle Lake Resort” on a card.
• After 1943 The hotel is sold several times, then becomes apartments.
• 44 years later
• 1987 The building burns.

If you go

ReadingFrench’s Hotel is gone, and the hill on North Shore Drive is private ground. The cards are the way to see it. The Edwardsburg Area History Museum is at 26818 Main Street in Edwardsburg; its website gives its season as mid-April to mid-December, open Tuesday to Friday from 1 to 4 p.m. and Saturday from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m., with free admission. Check before you travel, as hours change.