The Hotel Lakeside Celebrates 150 Years of Lake Breezes

Saturday starts a week of festivities in Lakeside, Ohio, that’s been 150 years in the making.

At 4 p.m. Saturday on the Lakeside lawn, the Hotel Lakeside will be rededicated in celebration of its sesquicentennial anniversary. Activities this week will also include a lecture by Lakeside historian George McCormick, author of “Hotel Lakeside: 150 Years of Hospitality” and ice cream social on Sunday, a puzzle competition on Tuesday and a symphony performance on Wednesday. Also, the lecture series next week will be about historic hotels, including such venerable places as the Greenbrier in West Virginia, the Hotel Breakers at Cedar Point and the late, lamented Hotel Victory on Put-in-Bay.

The hotel is almost as old as the Chautauqua community itself, and although it’s faced financial difficulties through the years and nearly met the wrecking ball before its centennial, it remains a charming relic of a bygone era.

“It really is a treasured gem,” says Gretchen Colon, the vice president of advancement and marketing for Lakeside. “It’s become a tradition itself for families who come back summer after summer. Some even stay in the same room year after year.

“It’s been woven into the fabric of the community.”

Lakeside started in 1873 as a campground built by Methodists, as a site for tent revivals. Not long afterward, it became part of the Chautauqua movement, named for a city in upstate New York, that promoted education, spiritual growth and recreational activities.

Cottages started to be built to accommodate summer visitors, and in 1875, the Hotel Lakeside opened, making it the third-oldest operating hotel in Ohio, McCormick says, trailing only the Golden Lamb in Lebanon and the Buxton Inn in Granville. The hotel initially had 37 rooms, a dining room and an attached outhouse — for men staying there, points out McCormick. (Women had to rely on chamber pots, he says.)

In 1879, a two-story annex was built, with 16 rooms on each floor, to house hotel staff and servants for guests at the hotel. The hotel benefitted early on from the support of President Rutherford B. Hayes, who lived in nearby Fremont and visited Lakeside regularly with his wife, Lucy, occasionally holding Army reunions there. (William McKinley, another Ohio-born president who served with Hayes during the Civil War, also spoke there.) Another addition was built for the hotel in 1890.

The hotel was soon known for its views of the lake, its wraparound porches (at one point, the second floor had one as well) and a perpetually busy dining room and lobby. McCormick says that a lot of visitors came to Lakeside on steamships, and there were also special railroad excursions, with hotel staff running hither and yon to register guests by the dozens and deliver their baggage to their rooms — with no elevator, he adds.

Other famous guests included Eleanor Roosevelt, who never stayed overnight at the hotel, but used it as her office space on visits to Lakeside, and pilot Amelia Earhart, who spoke at Lakeside several times, and was slated for an appearance in August 1937 — as it turned out, a month after her ill-fated attempt to fly around the world.

In 1936, McCormick visited Lakeside for the first time. He doesn’t remember much about that trip; after all, he was three months old. But he came back many times since, first with his family and then, while he was in college, as a houseman, doing maintenance and handling hotel linens.

“When I was a kid, I’d run through the hotel — nobody watched you in those days — and I found the secret rooms and doors,” he says. “It was very busy at that point. People would line up to eat in the dining room, the rooms were all filled and it was a happening place.”

But the years took a toll. The south annex was torn down in 1963, and the second-floor porches were taken down due to safety concerns. “I saw a plan for a new hotel in the 1960s, and it really scared me,” McCormick says.

The third floor was uninhabitable, McCormick says, with mattresses soaking up water from leaks in the roof. At one point in the early 1970s — as demolition was being considered — only 20 rooms were available for rental, he says, but there were only enough linens for 11 rooms to be rented at any one time.

The hotel was worth preserving, though, and the Friends of Hotel Lakeside was formed to do just that. As it celebrates its 150^th anniversary, the hotel remains a hub for the community. “The lobby is the community family room,” Colon says. The porch is a gathering place for the whole community.”

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