100 Elk Lake summers
Bob Evans (front row, hat on knee) and his family celebrate 100 years on Elk Lake this summer. Courtesy photo
By Barb Mosher, Contributing Writer
Earlier this month, the shaded drive of Bob Evans’ (no, not THAT Bob Evans) summer home overlooking Elk Lake’s Spencer Bay was lined with cars bearing license plates from Indiana, Ohio, Illinois, Texas, and Michigan. Other family members came in from Florida, Tennessee, North Carolina, and California to join in celebrating 100 summers on the lake.
Large gatherings are a common summer scene in northern Michigan as relatives and lucky friends step outside of their elsewhere everyday lives to converge on family homes, cottages, and cabins, returning year after year to savor the simple seasonal delights of water, sand, and woods, to celebrate special events, and to pass on time-honored traditions.
Bob’s clan typically starts showing up in late June, with most staying two weeks or longer. Not all sleep at Bob’s, but his place is the hub for more than 30 family members from sunup to sundown and beyond. They include Bob’s three sons, their children and grandchildren, and the children and grandchildren of his older brother, Richard.
Bob and Richard grew up in Greencastle, Indiana, near Indianapolis. Two maternal aunts, Florence Jones and Ruby Jones (both teachers who never married or had children of their own), had been spending summers since 1926 in Millers Park, a development of rustic seasonal cottages running south from Fourth Street on the eastern edge of Elk Rapids.
The sisters’ original 800-square-foot uninsulated cabin featured one bedroom plus a loft, a hand pump in the kitchen sink, an outhouse on the back lot, and 50 feet of Elk Lake frontage. It was too good to keep to themselves, so they began inviting their nephews to spend the summers with them. The only caveat: they had to be at least six years old to come without their parents.
“It was a three-day trip to get up here,” said Bob, whose first trip north without his folks was in 1945. “We’d stop somewhere in northern Indiana, and then somewhere near Grand Rapids. I can remember coming through Kalkaska and across M-72, which at that time was packed sand, no asphalt, no paving. It was a big deal when we got to the point where we could see up through Skegemog Lake and clear up Elk Lake. That was always exciting, the point where we’d say, ‘Yes, we’re there!’”
While their parents would join them for a couple of weeks later in the summer, much of the season was the aunts, the boys, and the neighboring Millers Park families. El Nido (the nest), as the cottage came to be called, was the perfect place for Bob and Richard to strengthen and flex their wings. Each summer provided ample opportunities to hone skills learned in previous years alongside new challenges to explore and conquer.
A letter Florence wrote to Richard when he was 23 recounts some of the adventures of the two brothers as their childhood summers played out on the shore of Elk Lake. Sunny days were spent swimming, boating through the Chain of Lakes, catching turtles, playing croquet, fishing, placing pennies on the railroad tracks behind the property, building traps to catch critters, and making trips to the hardware store to buy supplies for an endless array of other projects.
Rainy days were for reading on the screened-in porch or catching a movie at the Elk Rapids theater. Nights meant sleeping on the porch or camping in a pup tent between the cottage and the lake. Bob sums it up simply: “We were blessed.”
As the boys turned into young men, summer jobs and college schedules shortened but never eliminated their summer trips to El Nido. Eventually they began bringing their wives and children north. Over time, modern plumbing was added and the screened-in porch was enclosed, adding an extra 200-square feet to the structure.
A thousand square feet plus a deck still made cramped quarters for the growing family, but no one seemed to care. Summers on Elk Lake were never meant to be lived inside. Bob’s and Richard’s children have memories similar to their fathers’ of endless days spent in or on the water, their exhausted bodies finally collapsing in the loft with its small lake-facing window ushering in the sounds of evening activities at nearby White Birch Lodge.
It doesn’t get much more idyllic than that. But eventually, the perfect tiny cottage couldn’t keep up with the ever-increasing family who couldn’t stay away. So, in 1990, Richard and Bob (who had inherited the cottage together) sold El Nido and bought property less than a quarter mile south on Spencer Bay. Each built a house suitable for hosting their growing families and creating new memories of the traditional variety side by side.
A successful real estate business he still maintains at 87 has kept Bob’s permanent address at the farm in Greencastle where he grew up. But from May to October, he spends as much time as he can on Elk Lake. Richard sold his Spencer Bay house after his wife died, and Bob’s became the gathering spot for both families.
There’s never much of an agenda at the lake, according to Deb Hickman, Bob’s niece. “When people ask what we do up here, the answer is ‘nothing.’ We walk from the house to the dock, hang out in the Adirondack chairs, and come back up when we’re thirsty or hungry.”
The unhurried days connect them to the simpler times of the generations who came before. Bob’s granddaughter Annie Evans lives in California but is so anchored to Elk Lake that she has the address of Bob’s place tattooed on her side. “This has always been my favorite place in the world and the place where I’ve felt the most myself, the most happy, the most at peace,” she said. “It’s where I return to recharge. It’s a special place for all of us.”
A hundred years after his aunts first came to Elk Rapids, Bob sits on his deck with three younger generations milling around, most of them down on the dock where anything that’s worth happening happens. “What’s not to love?” he said. “This is deeply ingrained in our family. They all love it here.”
Earlier this month, the shaded drive of Bob Evans’ (no, not THAT Bob Evans) summer home overlooking Elk Lake’s Spencer Bay was lined with cars bearing license plates from Indiana, Ohio, Illinois, Texas, and Michigan. Other family members came in from Florida, Tennessee, North Carolina, and California to join in celebrating 100 summers on the lake.
Large gatherings are a common summer scene in northern Michigan as relatives and lucky friends step outside of their elsewhere everyday lives to converge on family homes, cottages, and cabins, returning year after year to savor the simple seasonal delights of water, sand, and woods, to celebrate special events, and to pass on time-honored traditions.
Bob’s clan typically starts showing up in late June, with most staying two weeks or longer. Not all sleep at Bob’s, but his place is the hub for more than 30 family members from sunup to sundown and beyond. They include Bob’s three sons, their children and grandchildren, and the children and grandchildren of his older brother, Richard.
Bob and Richard grew up in Greencastle, Indiana, near Indianapolis. Two maternal aunts, Florence Jones and Ruby Jones (both teachers who never married or had children of their own), had been spending summers since 1926 in Millers Park, a development of rustic seasonal cottages running south from Fourth Street on the eastern edge of Elk Rapids.
The sisters’ original 800-square-foot uninsulated cabin featured one bedroom plus a loft, a hand pump in the kitchen sink, an outhouse on the back lot, and 50 feet of Elk Lake frontage. It was too good to keep to themselves, so they began inviting their nephews to spend the summers with them. The only caveat: they had to be at least six years old to come without their parents.
“It was a three-day trip to get up here,” said Bob, whose first trip north without his folks was in 1945. “We’d stop somewhere in northern Indiana, and then somewhere near Grand Rapids. I can remember coming through Kalkaska and across M-72, which at that time was packed sand, no asphalt, no paving. It was a big deal when we got to the point where we could see up through Skegemog Lake and clear up Elk Lake. That was always exciting, the point where we’d say, ‘Yes, we’re there!’”
While their parents would join them for a couple of weeks later in the summer, much of the season was the aunts, the boys, and the neighboring Millers Park families. El Nido (the nest), as the cottage came to be called, was the perfect place for Bob and Richard to strengthen and flex their wings. Each summer provided ample opportunities to hone skills learned in previous years alongside new challenges to explore and conquer.
A letter Florence wrote to Richard when he was 23 recounts some of the adventures of the two brothers as their childhood summers played out on the shore of Elk Lake. Sunny days were spent swimming, boating through the Chain of Lakes, catching turtles, playing croquet, fishing, placing pennies on the railroad tracks behind the property, building traps to catch critters, and making trips to the hardware store to buy supplies for an endless array of other projects.
Rainy days were for reading on the screened-in porch or catching a movie at the Elk Rapids theater. Nights meant sleeping on the porch or camping in a pup tent between the cottage and the lake. Bob sums it up simply: “We were blessed.”
As the boys turned into young men, summer jobs and college schedules shortened but never eliminated their summer trips to El Nido. Eventually they began bringing their wives and children north. Over time, modern plumbing was added and the screened-in porch was enclosed, adding an extra 200-square feet to the structure.
A thousand square feet plus a deck still made cramped quarters for the growing family, but no one seemed to care. Summers on Elk Lake were never meant to be lived inside. Bob’s and Richard’s children have memories similar to their fathers’ of endless days spent in or on the water, their exhausted bodies finally collapsing in the loft with its small lake-facing window ushering in the sounds of evening activities at nearby White Birch Lodge.
It doesn’t get much more idyllic than that. But eventually, the perfect tiny cottage couldn’t keep up with the ever-increasing family who couldn’t stay away. So, in 1990, Richard and Bob (who had inherited the cottage together) sold El Nido and bought property less than a quarter mile south on Spencer Bay. Each built a house suitable for hosting their growing families and creating new memories of the traditional variety side by side.
A successful real estate business he still maintains at 87 has kept Bob’s permanent address at the farm in Greencastle where he grew up. But from May to October, he spends as much time as he can on Elk Lake. Richard sold his Spencer Bay house after his wife died, and Bob’s became the gathering spot for both families.
There’s never much of an agenda at the lake, according to Deb Hickman, Bob’s niece. “When people ask what we do up here, the answer is ‘nothing.’ We walk from the house to the dock, hang out in the Adirondack chairs, and come back up when we’re thirsty or hungry.”
The unhurried days connect them to the simpler times of the generations who came before. Bob’s granddaughter Annie Evans lives in California but is so anchored to Elk Lake that she has the address of Bob’s place tattooed on her side. “This has always been my favorite place in the world and the place where I’ve felt the most myself, the most happy, the most at peace,” she said. “It’s where I return to recharge. It’s a special place for all of us.”
A hundred years after his aunts first came to Elk Rapids, Bob sits on his deck with three younger generations milling around, most of them down on the dock where anything that’s worth happening happens. “What’s not to love?” he said. “This is deeply ingrained in our family. They all love it here.”
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