The Door County Photographs of Ferdinand Hotz
This remarkable collection of photographs taken by German immigrant and successful Chicago jeweler and merchant, Ferdinand Hotz, documents one of Wisconsin's most popular tourist regions just as it was evolving from farmland into a vacation destination. His earliest Door County photographs are from a family trip by steamer to Fish Creek about 1908, but most date from the 1920s. They document his landholdings, including the Fish Creek and Europe Lake cottages, Gibraltar Orchards, and many other locations, as well as his daughters, Alice, Helen and Margaret, and son Ferdinand Leonard (Fedy). The Hotz collection reveals Door County as it was at the turn of the 20th century, with unimproved roads and clusters of small dwellings on the shores of working harbors. The collection also documents the peninsula's many picturesque lighthouses.
Hotz Becomes Door County's Largest Landowner
Hotz first visited Door County as a tourist in 1905, after which his family made annual visits from their home in Glencoe, Illinois, to a German-owned resort in Fish Creek. Soon he was buying his own property in the area, including the Gibraltar Orchards, a beachside cottage, tracts of farmland, and a hilltop pasture overlooking Fish Creek Harbor and the village where he built a compound of rustic cottages designed by Chicago-area architect Lawrence Buck.
After Peninsula State Park opened nearby in 1910, the area saw many more visitors, and Hotz relocated further north. He built a second cottage on Europe Lake, in the town of Liberty Grove, where he had acquired more than 10 miles of Lake Michigan shoreline. By the 1920s he was Door County's largest landowner. Hotz's 1,400 acres of shoreline were later combined with other tracts to form the 2,400-acre Newport State Park.