Hemingway at Walloon Lake
In 1899 the Hemingways of Oak Park, Illinois built a summer cottage called Windemere some six miles northwest of here on Walloon Lake. Young Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961) spent his days at the lake reading, fishing, hunting and boating. In 1921 he and Hadley Richardson married at a Methodist Church in Horton Bay and honeymooned at Windemere. Hemingway lived and traveled throughout the world yet his boyhood experiences and the people he knew in Horton Bay and Walloon Lake continued to inspire his writing. Local friends such as Bill and Katy Smith and the Dilworths served as models for characters in his short stories and novels. Ernest Hemingway won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1954."All the love went into fishing and the summer. He had loved it more than anything. He had loved digging potatoes with Bill in the fall . . . . The hills at the foot of Walloon Lake, storms on the lake. . . delivering vegetables around the lake. . . comong up from the foot of the lake with groceries, the mail and the Chicago paper under a tarpaulin. . . . the wind in the hemlocks and the wet pine needles underfoot when he ws barefoot going for the milk. Getting up at daylight to row across the lake and hike over the hills after a rain to fish in Hortons Creek." -From "On Writing," The Nick Adams Stories by Ernest Hemingway. Copyright 1972 The Ernest Hemingway Foundation. Used Courtesy of Scribner, a Division of Simon and Schuster, Inc. Ernest Hemingway drove ambulances in Italy during Workd War I, attended bullfights in Pamplona, and hunted big game in Africa. Like these worldwide experiences, his adventures in "Upper Michigan," where he spent idyllic summers as a youth, influenced his work throughout his career. In 1924 he authored "On Writing," a short story published in the 1972 anthology The Nick Adams Stories.
Plaque via Michigan History Center