Wisconsin Historical Images from the Wisconsin Historical Society
March 2014

FEATURED GALLERY
| Highlights from over three million photographs in our holdings



 A cow lies alongside a road in an orchard of blooming cherry trees, May 1916. WHI 93293

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.

 

  


BROWSE THE COLLECTIONS | View nearly 60,000 digitized visual materials in our online database


  International Harvester

 
This gallery of more than 500 photographs is a treasure trove of imagery for anyone interested in farmers, farm animals, factory workers, tractors, advertising, small-town life and dozens of other topics.

View the Gallery >>

  Settling Northern Wisconsin
 Bountiful Harvests, Prosperous Families


In the late 19th century, farming was replacing logging in the cut-over regions of northern Wisconsin. View a gallery of photographs intended to lure farmers to the region with images of bountiful harvests and prosperous farm families.

This monthly email newsletter from Wisconsin Historical Images features gallery exhibits from the Wisconsin Historical Society's visual materials collections.
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Link to Society's website at wisconsinhistory.org

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