Where memories were made – the cottage on Fish Lake
by Willard Robinson, MHS Class of 1949
With 36 six lakes in the Marcellus area there was plenty of good fishing, boating, and swimming. One year when I was about 6 years old, my parents along with my mother’s sister’s family rented a cottage on Fish Lake for a week. It was one of several cottages located on a point of land that stuck out into the lake and contained the Loveridge Hotel. There wasn’t a beach near the cottage, but I and my cousins swam there anyway despite the muddy bottom. Occasionally, we saw a snake moving on the surface of the water, but they kept away from us. The adults liked to fish with cane poles, and we had plenty of fish to eat. What I was most fascinated with that week were the group of Boy Scouts that were staying in the hotel. I would often sit on the back steps of the cottage and watch them do their rituals when the flag was raised in the morning and lowered in the evening.
When we went to a lake just for a swim we would go to Streeter Beach on Gravel Lake. It was a nice beach but there were no facilities. The beach had a gravel bottom as you would expect given the name of the lake. When my Great Uncle Bill, Dr. Davis’s son, retired from his job in Chicago he moved to Paw Paw, MI, and bought a cottage on Gravel Lake. He fixed it up and had a nice deck built on the side where the main entrance was located. It was located three cottages east of Willow Beach, an area almost directly across the lake from Streeter Beach. Willow Beach had a store and rented boats. Just off Willow Beach was a long shallow area reaching out towards the center of the lake and full of bulrushes. It was a good place to fish for bass. Uncle had a pier built and a rowboat was built by someone in Marcellus. We raked the weeds out around the pier and we had our own swimming area.
The cottage was the place where Uncle Bill hosted my mother’s siblings and their children (my cousins) and my family being the closest got to use it a lot. My uncle Willard Russell taught me how to fish for bass with a casting rod and reel and when he came to the cottage, he always took me fishing with him. Bass fishing was usually best in the early morning and as the day was ending. One evening as we were getting close to the pier and it was almost dark, I casted toward a clump of bullrushes and I heard the lure go spat as it hit the water and I thought it had landed in the bullrushes. I expected we would have to retrieve it as hooks would be caught in the rushes. Instead, as I tried to reel the line in, I discovered I had a bass and not a weed on my lure’s hooks and it was a big one. It weighed 3½ pounds and was the biggest I ever caught up to that time.
I really enjoyed swimming and always felt comfortable in the water. I got to thinking that I could probably swim across the lake to Streeter Beach. One day when someone was there to accompany me with the rowboat, I started across the lake. When I got tired, I would just float for a while until I was ready to go on. I made it across and I was pretty tired but happy.
One thing I observed at the cottage was that thunderstorms always seemed so much more intense at the lake. There seemed to be more lightning strikes close by and a cottage just a little further along the lakeshore was struck and a fireball was seen coming down the downspout to the ground. In the cottage there was a light switch at the top of the stairs leading to the second floor. Just before a close lightning strike, it would arc over and you could hear it. I learned later when I studied for my degree in Electrical Engineering that before a lightning strike an electrical field will build up between the cloud and the ground until it was so intense there would be an arc between the cloud and ground that we call lightning. This high electrical field was causing the switch to have a small arc over.
When I was enjoying the cottage in the late 1940’s there were only cottages around the Streeter Beach area and the strip of shoreline from Willow Beach west. Within a few years the cottages were being built all around the lake as the area attracted people from the Chicago and South Bend areas. Now the lake has cottages all around its shore. In 1991 my mother hosted a family reunion that included all my cousins
Several wanted to go to Gravel Lake and see the cottage they had enjoyed as children. It had been sold many years ago and I hadn’t seen since it was sold. We went to the lake and found the place it had been, but the cottage was gone and replaced with a very modern large two-story house. We could relate to the setting, but the cottage of our memories was gone.
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