Chapter 7

Hazen's Long Lake Lodge

Something can happen when people first step into the lodge of a historic northwoods Wisconsin resort. A certain sort of feeling takes over when the old screen door creaks and slams behind them and the modern world with all of its trappings is left behind.

Maybe it's the look of hand-hewn timbers, or a ceiling of knotty pine, or the photos of generations of anglers adorning the walls.

Or maybe it is simply a sense of the people themselves, the thousands through the years that sought refuge at a quiet place on a quiet lake somewhere “north of the tension zone.” The dads and granddads who told countless stories while being warmed by a fire of birch and maple logs. The endless rainy day games of dominoes packed into a weeklong vacation that never seemed to last long enough.

The feeling is strongest inside the oldest of northwoods resorts, those with origins that go back seventy-five or even one hundred years or more to when adventurous entrepreneurs followed close on the heels of the white pine loggers to begin to transform the northwoods economy from one of lumbering into one of tourism and recreation.

The Hazen Inn, located on Long Lake just east of Phelps in Vilas County, is one of those resorts. Known for more than one hundred years as Hazen's Long Lake Lodge, the Hazen Inn is one of the oldest resorts still operating in northern Wisconsin. Stepping into the inn's main lodge on a warm day recently, I could immediately feel the history of the place.

The original lodge building was built in 1900, when elsewhere in the United States John Philip Sousa was making a name for himself as a pretty good bandleader and Carrie Nation was smashing taverns in the name of temperance. In 1915, the year the millionth Ford rolled off the line, a dining area was added, and in the 1920s the lodge was expanded to include a great room centered around a black granite fireplace.

Today the resort is being run as a bed-and-breakfast inn by Joel and Janet McClure, transplanted Iowans with a flair for hospitality and a strong respect for history. The McClures purchased the century-old lodge after their son happened upon it in 1993 and they made the decision to leave their lives in Iowa to run a bed-and-breakfast resort in the northwoods. At the time they hadn't quite realized that they had just purchased an important piece of northwoods history.

“We really weren't aware of the long history of the lodge until we bought it and started learning about Charles Hazen and the Hazen family,” Janet McClure told me as we sat in the original dining room of the resort under the watchful eyes of a buck and a snowy owl mounted decades before I was born. “As time went by we learned more and more.”1

What they learned was that, as with many of the old northwoods resorts, the Long Lake Lodge began because of one man with a vision. Charles E. Hazen was born in Monroe County, New York, in 1872. At the age of sixteen, he left New York for adventure, ending up in Conover, Wisconsin, where he became employed by the Twin Lake Hunting and Fishing Club (later known as the Lakota Resort). For a number of years Hazen remained in the northwoods, working at several different resorts. At the time, entrepreneurs were first beginning to cater to the new breed of sportsman, the fellow who would pay good money for a north Wisconsin fishing or hunting experience.

Hazen liked what he saw and wanted to be a part of the developing north-woods resort industry. In order to acquire enough capital to build his own resort, he headed down to Chicago in 1895. For five years he worked for the Drovers' Journal, the publication for cattlemen, as the manager of a stock barn.

With money saved, Hazen returned to the northwoods in 1900 and purchased fifty-three acres on the shores of Long Lake. Using tamarack logs cut nearby and lumber he purchased in Chicago and had shipped by rail to Conover and then hauled to Long Lake, he built three log cabins in 1900 and a main lodge building in 1901. The Long Lake Lodge, originally a simple fishing camp, was born.

After the turn of the century, resorts began to offer amenities that far surpassed those of the early primitive hunting and fishing camps as the tourist base grew to include families. Hazen's resort was no exception. Fresh vegetables, eggs, cream, and milk were produced on the property. A maple syrup camp was started to provide guests with fresh syrup for breakfast. The resort was one of the first to have electricity—thanks to a fifteen-horsepower Fairbanks-Morse engine generator—and steam heat run to the cabins through an underground tunnel system.

Hazen, who became known in the area as “Uncle Charlie,” continually improved and expanded the resort. Eventually the resort covered three hundred acres with one thousand feet of shoreline and included eleven tamarack log cabins. It became a classic example of the family-operated northwoods resort.

Passed down to Uncle Charlie's son, Harvey, and then to Harvey's daughter Sunny Fondrie, Hazen's Long Lake Lodge endured as a family-owned operation for more than seventy-five years—a time that could be called the golden age of the traditional northwoods resort.

The resort was sold by the Fondries in 1978 and changed hands several times in the next few years as subsequent owners failed to stay solvent. A bank foreclosure in the late 1980s resulted in many of the cabins being sold off to individuals. No longer being run as a resort, the main lodge was neglected and fell into disrepair.

Luckily, it was at this time that the old lodge somehow found the McClures. “When we purchased the lodge in 1993 it was in a state of neglect and required a lot of work,” said Janet McClure. “During rainstorms or melting snow we had to place buckets in the dining room. Some of the showers leaked, and we would have guests reporting that the water was coming through the ceilings in the great room behind the sofa or chairs in which they were sitting. Cold air would rush into the inn through the openings between the logs and around the poorly insulated windows. Bats would be flying about routinely most nights…a challenging and exciting event!”2

During the first few years of ownership the McClures spent long hours making emergency repairs, and then came the effort to restore the old lodge to its original glory.

“Everything that we made the first five or more years went right back into the maintenance and repair of the structure,” said Janet McClure.³

The McClures' hard work has paid off. The flavor and atmosphere of Charles Hazen's Long Lake Lodge has been revived and can be enjoyed by guests at what is now called the Hazen Inn. An old pine sideboard remains in the same location in the dining room as seen in resort postcards from the earliest days. The bald eagle that Uncle Charlie killed and had mounted after it attempted to snack on his live duck decoys in the early 1900s still perches inside a display case at one end of the lodge, a testament to a bygone era.

Today, most visitors to the Hazen Inn go there for the relaxation and quiet it provides, but guests soon realize that the greatest asset of the resort is its century of northwoods history.