We slept very well in the quiet of the Chesnutt House, and spent a very leisurely morning lounging about. It had gotten quite nippy overnight (down into the 40s) but after some hot tea and the sun being a little higher in the sky, sitting on a porch swing on the screened porch and reading about Idlewild past and present in several of the books Colleen has gathered was really interesting, and the most quiet and relaxed I’ve been in a long time. We also kept watching and listening to birds overhead; I saw a beautiful woodpecker and kept hoping he’d come back. It’s hard to describe how quiet and peaceful it felt.
Just before noon, Colleen came out and suggested that we’d have lunch in the next town over, so we drove to a village called Chase and had barbecue there (I have never had a pulled-pork quesadilla, but it was actually quite good!). Then we went to meet the town historian, Chris, at the old elementary school of Idlewild that is now basically the town hall. (I learned a lot about township administrations, which in the case of Idlewild and many other communities around here, many of them not incorporated, have the function of a small-town administration. Townships have supervisors; they are legal agents for a township and work as a 5-member board to develop a budget and make financial decisions. Colleen has been one and also served as treasurer for the township once.) The reason we started our tour here was that Chris has an old classroom (or perhaps the old school auditorium?) set up as an exhibit, with many photos and artefacts from Idlewild and also some important reminders about the Jim Crow era and the reason why there WERE Black resorts to begin with. Some of the old photos gave us a good idea of what things used to look like in the 1920s, 1930s, and up until today, and prepared us for the little driving tour that Chris and Colleen gave us right afterwards.
We had already seen the locations around the lake, but now we got some of the more detailed background, including on the home owned by one of the Black founders, a doctor from Chicago named Hale Williams, the first surgeon to conduct open-heart surgery, who also first got the Chesnutts interested in summering in Idlewild, and on the homestead that Madame C.J. Walker owned on the lake and planned to develop (she died before she was able to, but her children and grandchildren did build a home there). But we also saw some of the old stores, restaurants, and motels on Lake Idlewild and Paradise Lake. We saw several that were closed, but two motels are still operating on Paradise Lake, and Williams Island has a bar which is open on weekends; it has changed names over the years but is now called Peyton’s Bar and run by a community group . It’s clear, though, that the area is beloved by the seasonal visitors who come for summer (just like the Chesnutts used to do), and people who live here year round now, even though they or their parents or grandparents started as summer residents (like Colleen’s grandparents, who came from Detroit, and Chris’, who came from Cleveland). The Historic District designation and various organizations with more funding than the township alone can drum up should help with the restoration or replacement of some of the historic buildings. It’s clear that later in the summers there is a lot going on–there are Idlewild clubs in several major cities (Colleen gave me the names: Cleveland Idlewilders, Detroit Idlewilders, Mid-Michigan Idlewilders, Chicago Idlewilders and the Original Chicago Idlewilders!) and their members who come here for the summer all throw big cook-out parties in August. There are also a lot of little tours and day visitors, and obviously a lot of real estate constantly changing hands. Colleen is apparently constantly being asked what lots on the lake are for sale. And Chris, who does not live year-round in Idlewild anymore, was actually in town because he was preparing to give a group a tour of the area on Saturday.
(a non-profit is starting on it with the help of a grant)
Around 4 pm we said our goodbyes, full of information about Idlewild (and with many questions for the next visit!) and were back on the road, and we drove up North for about two hours to get to a lovely little 12-room motel right on the East arm of the Grand Traverse Bay. The views en route of Lake Michigan were spectacular, and for dinner we headed into the tiny resort town of Elk Rapids, a marked contrast to Idlewild in that it was clearly so wealthy, so scrubbed clean, and full of full-time residents and little shops that can make a good living on a well-developed old-style main street that emerged from 19th-century lumber wealth in this area. The founder’s mansion, built on a little island basically constructed to spec on a sandbar in the 1890s, now has the town’s adorable public library in it, there is beach access right from downtown, and in a couple of weeks, when the season really gets going, it will be bustling! We found a little hole-in-the-wall Asian restaurant and some very good ice cream, as well as a little hiking area with a beach walk and a “sculpture walk” in the woods. Even by our teeny motel, there was another beach access spot, and we spent some time before sunset rambling around, spotting a powered paraglider–not something I had ever seen before!
