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cabins for rent, and a small Texaco gas station/marina. My family’s boats in the 1930’s and 1940’s had been serviced at Tassier’s Boat Works, which was a 1⁄4 mile south of town on the channel between a peninsula of mainland and LaSalle Island, but after 1952 our boat was stored at the Texaco, where there was a large boathouse for pulling and servicing boats behind the gas station. We would park the car there, load the boat, and soon be on our way to the cottage of our dreams, which was on LaSalle Island.
To get to the cottage from town, we went down the channel between the peninsula of mainland on the right and a series of cottages on LaSalle Island on the left, called Cincinnati Row after the city the owners were from. Two of the boathouses were two-story affairs, with living or sleeping quarters over the berths for the boats. The channel gave way to a broader, unnamed bay at Islington Point, the spit of land at the end of the penin- sula where the Islington Hotel, a relatively upscale place owned and operated by a member of the Stroh brewery family, stood. A little further on the left, on LaSalle Island, was the Elliot (House) Hotel, built by Elliot Holbrook as a modest boardinghouse in the early 1890’s and purchased and enlarged in 1896 by Amos Beach to accommodate 35-40 guests. His business model was to have a resort hotel with guest cottages around it, called Holbrook Resort, whose occupants would go to the hotel
for meals and socializing. The Elliot Hotel had a long, high, impressive pier extending 150 feet from the top of the hill in front of the hotel out well into the bay where the water was deep enough to dock the inter-island Arnold Line ferryboats, which brought guests from Mackinac Island to the hotels. The ferry arrived each afternoon between 3 and 4 PM, proudly blowing its horn as it traversed the bay, stopping at the Elliot and the Islington hotels to pick up and deliver passengers. All these hotels are gone now, and the Elliot dock has long since washed away, but the stumps of the huge pilings from its pier still lurk under the surface of the water to surprise unwary boaters.
After our week at the cottage, we usually made the trip home in one day, even if it meant arriving in the middle of the night. Other than that, the return trips were not memorable. In fact, I can remember only two of them. One night, well after dark, after we pulled onto U.S. Route 20, which runs east-west across Ohio, my mother fairly quickly recognized we were going in the wrong direction. Pop, of course, denied it and kept driving, and kept driving. He kept driving, in fact, until we were well into Indiana and signs for Chicago began to appear. The other memorable occasion occurred when we were driving home in 1952. There is a long, high trestle bridge across the Maumee River south of Toledo. The river at that point is almost an estuary and very wide. When I
Webers
18 Washtenaw County Medical Society BULLETIN FALL 2021