Summer in Waupaca

Just a few miles southwest of Waupaca are the Chain O' Lakes, a series of fifteen connected lakes formed in the last ice age.  I've put together a history as best I can using the disparate sources available online.  From a history of the township of Farmington I learned  the first summer hotel was built there 1880 and private summer homes and cottages followed.  In 1886 Chris Hill and Charles Nessling built the Grand View Hotel on the south shore of Rainbow Lake. It was a two story frame building with a distinctive onion like dome on the corner nearest the lake.  There were also cottages adjacent to the hotel, it was a great success. In 1892 the hotel became the property of the Silver Lake Cottage company, an article from the Waupaca County Post of 8/6/1925 states the company built what was known as The Grand View Hotel.  I believe what is referred to was an annex to the hotel and designed by William Waters.  There were no documents stating that the design was authored by Waters but the look was unmistakably William Waters.  The front veranda is nearly identical to that of the Wisconsin State Building of the 1893 Chicago Worlds' Fair, the towers at each end look much like the tower  on the Lutz house in Oshkosh. ( See, Oshkosh Houses Part 6. 11/29/11)   

Improvements continued under the ownership of  Irving and Wallace Lord along with John Caughill also owners of the Waupaca Electric Light and Railway Company and the resort gained the reputation as being the finest in the county.  By the late 1920's, however, the resort was passe and was demolished.   

                          

The Loyola Villa was not a hotel exactly but a summer retreat for the Jesuits, so it would have had many hotel like characteristics.  It was built in 1896 on a peninsula between Otter and Rainbow lake, purchased from Miss Marle Chamberlain.  Published in the Oshkosh Daily Northwestern on the third of April, 1896, in the Short Notes column was the following line of type, " ....Architect Waters is preparing plans for a building 30 feet by 130 feet at Waupaca, to be used as a summer house for the Jesuit fathers of the state."  There was a porch which ran the length and breadth of the building and at one corner of the villa was a tower topped by an open belvidere.  According a one history the place was sold in 1970 but it didn't state to whom or it's fate.