The Cabin

After purchasing land on Long Lake, Arnold and Hugo Vogt cleared trees from the shore and built a small but comfortable cabin facing south toward the water. The cabin was built in a Craftsman style with stucco finish. Hugo built a stone wall along the shoreline for about 100 feet topped with decorative urns, perhaps to show off the house when seen from the lake. Rock steps lead directly to the cabin's front door as if in preparation for visitors to disembark from passing boats. Strangely, the brothers did not remove two small pine trees (or possibly planted them?) which directly block the view of the lake from their front windows.

The photo below shows the cabin from the west a few years later. A newer addition which does not appear in the photo above is an elaborate stone chimney built in a style similar to the concrete garden furniture built by Hugo in the early- to mid-1930s.

The chimney is made of concrete embedded with large round cobble stones. Decorative flower boxes project from the side and a large stone is given a prominent spot in the center.. An oversized bird house sits on top, though it seems unlikely birds would choose to live directly above the heat or smoke from a chimney opening. The smaller cobbles of the bird house might suggest that this was added on top at a different time from the chimney's construction, or simply that Hugo chose to use smaller stones for its more-delicate construction. The round roof of the birdhouse resembles the style of the guest register Hugo built in about 1930-1931.

The cabin has been modernized, re-sided and expanded, but the chimney still stands in the 2017 photo below.

After the brothers built the summer cabin as a place to live, they began clearing and landscaping the rest of the property. Arnold spent years adding organic materials such as manure and marsh grass to the soil of his flower beds to improve the existing sandy soil for gardening. The original access to the cabin was from a long winding path from a driveway and parking area at the east end of the lawn.

Over the next decades, Hugo devoted his time to beautifying the property with stone and concrete planters and terraces, while Arnold planted flowers and luxuriant gardens. Within a few years the beautiful plantings and curious rock walls had become a locally-known attraction, and the Vogts began selling postcard views such as those featured here. But what first brought widespread attention to the homespun tourist attraction were the unique fish in the lake.