Summer on Diamond Lake: Forest Hall and the island

Cassopolis, Mich. A tennis net is stretched across the lawn. Players stand at the net with their rackets, others watch from the shade, and a windmill stands above the roof. Along the ridge, in big letters, is the name: FOREST HALL. The card was published in 1909 by O. L. Yerty of Cassopolis, and the caption on its face reads “Forest Hall – Diamond Lake.”

Diamond Lake is the largest lake in Cass County, and for about sixty years it was the county’s summer playground. Railroad men from Chicago built the first big house on its north shore, steamboats crossed it with a band on the upper deck, and a hotel on its island fired off fireworks and artillery on the Fourth of July. By 1900 five resort hotels were competing for the trade. Forest Hall, the house on this card, was the oldest of them and lasted the longest.

This is the story of that summer world as the record keeps it: the county histories of 1882 and 1906, the picture postcards, the lake association’s timeline, and a few newspaper lines quoted along the way. Where we are leaning on the timeline rather than on a source we have read ourselves, we say so.

A lake the railroad found

DocumentedAlfred Mathews, writing the county’s history in 1882, called Diamond Lake the largest of its lakes: 1,083 acres, not counting an island of 40.79 acres. He added a small observation: the water of Stone Lake, half a mile away, was soft, while “that of Diamond Lake, only half a mile distant, is hard.” The Diamond Lake Association today gives the lake as 1,078 acres, about 60 percent of it under ten feet deep, with a deepest point of 64 feet.

ReadingThe railroads made the lake a resort. By the association’s timeline, the tracks of the Air Line linking Chicago with Cassopolis were laid in 1870 and soon became Michigan Central property, the Grand Trunk linked South Bend with Cassopolis at about the same time, and passenger and freight service began on both lines in 1871. In 1870 fishing on the lake was regulated for the first time, with the season closed from September through May and spearing outlawed.

ReadingIn 1872, the timeline says, three Michigan Central officials bought land on the north side and built a three-story vacation home, the “Chicago House,” with the Michigan Central depot a short distance away. That same year the Cassopolis Vigilant called the lake “a beautiful sheet of water, a resort for pleasure seekers with boats for fishing.” A year later the South Bend Union called it “A noted pleasure resort,” describing a Mr. Moon’s picnic and island outings from Moon’s Landing, with excursion rates on the railroad.

What Forest Hall was

ReadingThe Diamond Lake Association keeps a timeline of the lake, compiled by Jean Schultz from local sources and crediting Lois Webster Welch’s book A Diamond Sparkles. It says the house began in 1872 as “The Chicago House,” a vacation home on the north shore built by three officials of the Michigan Central Railroad. In 1880 it was renamed Forest Hall and leased as a public resort, and in 1891 a Mr. Rudd and a Dr. Laughton bought it and made it a health resort. A nine-hole golf course was laid out on its grounds in 1921. Forest Hall closed as a resort hotel in 1926 but stayed on as the clubhouse of the Diamond Lake Golf Club, and in 1935 it was torn down and its wood used to build a new clubhouse.

ReadingThe timeline fills in the years between. In 1878 Charles Morton bought an interest in the Moon & Linsley lake business and leased the Chicago House, also known as “The Club House.” When it was renamed Forest Hall in 1880, the lessees were Moon, Linsley & Morton, and the resort had a bowling alley, a dance floor, a steamer, boats and docks. Not every guest was welcome: that summer, the timeline says, “a gang of roughs” set fire to a tent at Forest Hall and to the steamer Gauntlet.

DocumentedA newspaper account of 2013, quoting the diver and lake historian Jim Scholz, gives the same beginning: “Three officials in 1872 built the Chicago House, or club house, later known as Forest Hall.” It mentions the bowling alley and the dance floor too.

ReadingThe timeline adds two details about the buyers of 1891: Mr. Rudd was a Cass County clerk, and Dr. Laughton was a homeopathic physician. The card of 1909, with its tall evergreens, wide lawn and tennis net, shows a house selling fresh air and exercise as much as fishing. The timeline also notes the arrival in 1890 of Elick Lowitz and his wife, Nellie, as first-time guests at Forest Hall. The Lowitz family of Chicago came back, built a cottage in Park Shore in 1899, and stayed on the lake for decades.

DocumentedThe county history of 1906 bears out the date of 1891. In the life of the hotel’s proprietor, Glover writes: “In 1891 he purchased the Forest Hall Hotel, which he has since been conducting.” He adds that the hotel had become “a favorite summer resort.” Forest Hall was not alone. The association’s timeline counts five resort hotels on the lake by 1900, and Glover describes another of them, Shore Acres, as “an attractive summer hotel.”

Steamers on the lake

ReadingMoving people across a lake of more than a thousand acres called for boats, and the timeline is full of them. Steam launches began service in 1874, when the Vigilant reported that the steam yacht O. W. Powers “walks on the waters of Diamond Lake like a thing of life.” By 1881 two steamboats were working: the Powers, 65 feet long, carrying about 350 passengers, and the Gauntlet, 55 feet, carrying about 75. A round trip cost 20 cents.

DocumentedThe 2013 account gives the scale in Scholz’s words: “That’s a large boat, carrying 350 people. You’re talking multiple decks.”

ReadingThe fleet grew with the crowds. In 1897, the timeline says, the steamer Cassopolis carried the Cassopolis band in the lake’s first Fourth of July boat parade, and Ellett Hopkins built the double-deck South Bend to compete with the other launches. In 1902 Captain John Bartlett of the island hotel bought the Cassopolis, adding her to his steamers Glenn and South Bend. In 1913 the South Bend caught fire and burned to the waterline off the island’s north shore. Her hull lay derelict until 1934, when it was towed to deep water and blown up with dynamite.

DocumentedThe wreck is still there. The 2013 account reports that in 1989 the divers Zoltan Tiser, Bill Archer, Dave Yates and Jim Couch “collected all the pieces back to one area” and marked it for other divers.

The island

DocumentedThe island was known long before the hotels. Mathews, in 1882, gives Diamond Lake an area of 1,083 acres, and he gives a section of his book to Job Wright, “the recluse of Diamond Lake Island,” and tells of Wright’s prediction of “Harrison’s early death.” The association’s timeline says Wright built a log cabin on the island in 1829 and lived there until he died in 1842.

ReadingThen the summer crowds came. By the association’s timeline, picnic parties were going over to the island in 1873. In 1878 Fred Moon and Colonel Allen built a croquet court, a roller skating rink, an outdoor dance platform and an amphitheater there, and the Cassopolis Vigilant reported in 1879 that there were now enough buildings on the island “to shelter 5000 people from storms.” In 1889 Captain John Bartlett bought the island and took over the Diamond Lake Island Hotel. The hotel closed in 1919, and in 1925 the island was platted for sale as residential lots.

ReadingThe timeline gives the island’s busiest years in detail. In 1878 the Singer Sewing Machine Company of South Bend held its biggest outing of the season there, with 1,600 people. In 1880 there was electric light near the amphitheater. The Fourth of July of 1882 brought not only fireworks and artillery but contests, a minstrel show, the Cassopolis band and fifteen-foot balloons. In 1883 Almeda Moon and her son Fred formed the Joliet Club on the island, served by one of the two steamers on the lake. In 1899 an insulated underwater telephone cable was laid out to it.

ReadingAfter the hotel closed in 1919, the island’s link to the shore became the question. In 1922 a plan for a cable barge between Shore Acres and the island was dropped as too long a crossing. In 1925, the year E. J. Kloss bought the island and platted it for lots, a bridge was begun, but lake residents stopped it after large pilings had been driven; the pilings were pulled in 1931. In 1959, after a proposal for an island road was opposed, a state law banned bridges and causeways on lakes of under 1,500 acres.

DocumentedThe island is still reached by water. The association says the Diamond Island Association was formed in 1951 to manage the private barge serving the island’s 99 cottages and houses, and that in 2019 a new six-car barge replaced a four-car barge that had run for almost seventy years. The island is private property.

Five hotels and a toboggan slide

ReadingForest Hall had company. The timeline names the other four hotels of 1900 and how each began. Captain Charles Shillaber, a retired English sea captain, built the Blink Bonnie Hotel in 1890: two stories, about twenty rooms, a large dining room and a porch on the west side. It added a thirty-foot toboggan slide in 1895 and moved its dance pavilion to a better spot on the beach in 1899. Shillaber called the meeting at Sandy Beach in 1896 that formed the Diamond Lake Yacht Club, and he became the lake’s first sailing instructor.

ReadingThe Diamond Lake Hotel, later the Anchorage Inn, was built in 1891 when Diamond Lake Park (later Park Shore) was platted; the Hutchings family bought it with the Park Shore boat landing in 1895. Shore Acres began in 1895, when James Leach bought an eighty-acre farm at $75 an acre and started a hotel on it; in 1915 it completed large additions and a dance hall. Then there was Captain Bartlett’s island hotel. A sixth house came later: Mrs. Hain’s Hain Villa in Park Shore, a fourteen-room resort hotel that in 1906 employed a staff of 24.

ReadingMoney from South Bend and Mishawaka built the cottages around them. In 1893, the timeline says, Mishawaka people made the lake a favorite vacation spot, though the trip by horse and buggy took most of a day. Fred G. Eberhart, vice president of the Ball Band works in Mishawaka, built the lake’s third cottage, “The Beeches,” in 1894. J. M. Studebaker built a 22-room summer home, “Crescent Surf,” at Sandy Beach in 1897, reportedly in two weeks for $1,500, and in 1900 he set the first timed automobile record from South Bend to the lake: “one hour and twenty minutes.”

ReadingOne by one the hotels went. The Blink Bonnie was sold and closed soon after 1905, and its grounds were platted as Sandy Beach. The island hotel closed in 1919. Hain Villa, one of the last two resort hotels, closed in 1933 and became four apartments. The Anchorage Inn exploded and burned just before the Fourth of July in 1938.

The card and the man who sold it

DocumentedOur card of Forest Hall carries the name of its publisher, O. L. Yerty of Cassopolis. Yerty’s name turns up on other cards of the village. The Detroit Public Library’s Burton Historical Collection holds a view of Broadway, postmarked 21 November 1908, whose front reads “Pub. by O.L. Yerty” and whose back reads “From photographs copyrighted by C.R. Childs Company, 5707 W. Lake St., Chicago, Ill.” Another, of Main Street, postmarked 29 August 1913, is printed “Pub. by O.L. Yerty. K. 1011.” Its writer, signed Mandy, was changing trains: “I am on my way home & have to wait here 4 hrs.”

ReadingThe pattern is a common one for small towns of the time. A local merchant put his name on the card and sold it over his counter, while the photograph, and in the Broadway card’s case the printing, came from a firm elsewhere. Our Forest Hall card is a real-photo card, printed on photographic paper, and the record does not name the photographer. The same library holds C. R. Childs cards of the lake itself, of the piers seen from Spring Beach and of the buildings and docks at Sandy Beach.

Documented New findingYerty was such a merchant. In the Cassopolis High School annual of 1915 he advertised “O. L. Yerty’s Cash Bargain Store, Cassopolis, Michigan,” “Headquarters for Bargains,” under the motto “Quality Up and Prices Down.”

DocumentedThese cards were mailed by the million. A 2011 column in the Edwardsburg Argus notes that the peak years of postcard collecting ran from about 1907 to 1913, and that the Post Office reported 668 million postcards mailed in the year ending 30 June 1908. Diamond Lake was still sending them a generation later: a card of Park Shore postmarked 18 August 1936, in the Burton Collection, begins, “Dear Lena, We like the place very much.”

Golf, a dam and the end of Forest Hall

ReadingForest Hall’s last chapter was golf. The nine-hole course laid out on its grounds in 1921 outlived the hotel. When the hotel closed in 1926 the building became the clubhouse of the Diamond Lake Golf Club, and when it came down in 1935 its timber went into the new clubhouse. A round, the timeline adds, cost 25 cents. Across the lake E. L. Lowitz of the Chicago family built the nine-hole Park Shore Golf Course in 1928, with farm hands.

ReadingThe lake itself was being fixed in place. In 1911 the Diamond Lake Park Improvement Association formed with 77 members and built a long pier. In 1927 the Diamond Lake Association built a dam at the outlet that fixed the water at 852.25 feet above sea level. Plats multiplied: Kamp Kozy in 1912, Spring Beach in 1919, the island and Howell Point in 1925, Diamond Shores in 1926. The association records that Diamond Shores Inc. was incorporated on 12 June 1926 and divided 61.8 acres on the southeast shore into 62 lots.

DocumentedOne plat carries a famous name. The association records that in 1946 a plat for Wade’s Addition to Diamond Lake, with Leigh Avenue running through it, was filed by Leigh Wade, Helen Moran Wade, Ethel W. Wood and Bertha Francis, and that the Wade family farmed nearby. Leigh Wade was born in Cassopolis in 1896, and his Air Force biography records him as “pilot and supply officer of the U.S. Army Air Service around-the-world flight from April 6 to Sept. 28, 1924.”

A timeline

• 1829 Job Wright builds a cabin on the island, by the association’s timeline; he lives there until 1842.
• 42 years later
• 1871 Passenger service begins on the Michigan Central and Grand Trunk lines through Cassopolis.
• 1872 Three Michigan Central officials build the Chicago House on the north shore.
• 1874 Steam launches begin service; the O. W. Powers on the lake.
• 1880 The Chicago House becomes Forest Hall, a public resort.
• 1882 Mathews gives the lake 1,083 acres and the island 40.79.
• 1889 Captain John Bartlett buys the island and its hotel.
• 1891 Rudd and Laughton buy Forest Hall and make it a health resort.
• 1900 Five resort hotels on the lake.
• 1909 O. L. Yerty publishes the Forest Hall card.
• 1913 The steamer South Bend burns off the island.
• 1919 The island hotel closes.
• 1921 A nine-hole golf course on the Forest Hall grounds.
• 1926 Forest Hall closes as a hotel and becomes the golf clubhouse.
• 1935 Forest Hall is torn down; its wood builds a new clubhouse.