Web Design in Walloon Lake, MI

About Walloon Lake, Charlevoix County

Walloon Lake is an unincorporated community and census-designated place in Charlevoix County, Michigan, seated inside Melrose Township at the southeastern end of the lake that shares its name, just north of where the water spills into the Bear River. The 2020 census counted 271 people across a CDP of 1.35 square miles, all of it dry land, at an elevation of 712 feet. It answers to area code 231 and holds its own 49796 ZIP code, with parts of the community also addressed through 49712 for Boyne City and 49713 for Boyne Falls. Coordinates are 45 degrees 15 minutes 58 seconds north, 84 degrees 56 minutes 00 seconds west.

History of Walloon Lake

• John Jones, Jr. and his family settled the shoreline as early as 1872, back when the water was called Bear Lake, and Jones arranged for the Grand Rapids and Indiana Railroad to lay track through the area in 1874. The depot came in under the name Melrose, after a local surveyor named Mel Rose, and the township took the same name, but residents petitioning for a post office could not use Bear Lake because Michigan already had one. The office opened as Tolcott on October 19, 1897 under first postmaster Frank Jones, was respelled Talcott on March 4, 1899, and became Walloon Lake on September 22, 1900. Walter Romig's Michigan Place Names records that local butcher J. R. Haas proposed the name after spotting it on an old railroad map that nobody could account for, and that a group of Walloons from Belgium had settled along the lake years earlier leaving no traces behind. The Census Bureau first drew boundaries and reported statistics for the place with the 2010 count.

Landmarks and Places in Walloon Lake

• Melrose Park, holding the dual-sided Hemingway at Walloon Lake state historic marker (registered site S0722)
• Walloon Lake Yacht Club, operating since 1907
• Ernest Hemingway Cottage (Windemere), listed on the National Register of Historic Places as a National Historic Landmark on November 24, 1968, one of 43 in Michigan, sited in Resort Township rather than in the CDP

Community Life in Walloon Lake

• The community carries the deepest Ernest Hemingway associations in northern Michigan. The Hemingway family first traveled north in 1898, bought several plots around the lake, and in 1900 built the cottage they called Windemere on the northern shore, which served as Ernest's summertime boyhood home while the family lived in Chicago. As a teenager he moved between here and Horton Bay, married Hadley Richardson at Horton Bay in 1921, left soon after, and returned once in 1951. The Nick Adams Stories and their central character drew on those summers, and some boyhood friends became models for his characters. The state dedicated Hemingway's presence here as a Michigan State Historic Site in 2010 and marked it with a dual-sided historic marker in Melrose Park at the center of the community. The Walloon Lake Yacht Club has operated continuously since 1907.

Local reference: en.wikipedia.org, en.wikipedia.org, www2.census.gov