Hemingway Country

Ernest Hemingway spent his most formative early years in the lakes and forests around Petoskey. Walloon Lake, about ten miles southeast of town, was where the Hemingway family rented Windemere Cottage from 1900 to 1920. The cottage still stands in private ownership and is not open to visitors, but you can see it from the lake. The town of Horton Bay on Lake Charlevoix, fifteen miles south of Petoskey, is the setting for several Nick Adams stories and has a general store that was there in Hemingway's time.

The Little Traverse History Museum in Petoskey has a small collection of Hemingway memorabilia. The Horton Bay General Store, which appears in "Up in Michigan," is a good reason to make the drive south — it is still operating as a store and local gathering place. The Black Bear Bar in Charlevoix, which Hemingway frequented as a young man, is another stop on an informal Hemingway tour of the region.

things to do sight
A story
Hemingway first came to northern Michigan as an infant in 1900 — his father rented Windemere Cottage on Walloon Lake, south of Petoskey. He returned every summer until he was twenty-one, and the landscape shaped him profoundly: the Nick Adams stories are set in this country, in the logging camps and trout streams that Hemingway knew as a boy. In "The End of Something," Nick and Marjorie are fishing at Horton Bay on Lake Charlevoix, just south of Petoskey. The Big Two-Hearted River is actually the Fox River, further north.