Volume LII | Issue 2
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OVER A CENTURY ON WALLOON The Wilhoit/Ice/Smith Family
The Wilhoit family arrives at the lake on the Tourist passenger boat in 1914. Trammel Ice, neighbor Chip Frentz, Charles Wilhoit, Barbara Ice Smith and Barbara Frentz enjoying a fishing expedition on Walloon, circa 1950. (Photos courtesy of the family) By Lauren Macintyre
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ike many other families, it was a honeymoon that first brought the remarkable Wilhoit/Ice/Smith family to Walloon. This honeymoon, however, took place more than 125 years ago, when businessman and banker Charles Wilhoit, Sr. brought his bride Louise Wisehart via train from Middletown, Indiana to Petoskey in 1896. Already in love with each other, they soon fell in love with the Petoskey area, buying land and building a cottage on what is now Lake Grove Road. The area was not only beautiful, the pure air of Walloon was also good for Charles’s hay fever and asthma.
Traveling to Walloon was a bit challenging in those days. First, they took an overnight train from Indiana to Petoskey, then transferred to the local train called the “Dummy” which took them to the Walloon Village at the foot. From the Village, the Wilhoits and their children loaded all their trunks on that most famous of Walloon passenger boats, the Tourist, for the final part of their journey to the West Arm. The Tourist stopped at the landing of the very popular Lake Grove Hotel, and from there the family walked to their nearby cottage. Later in 1907, preferring a lakefront that was lower and closer to the water, the Wilhoits built a different cottage nearby on what is now known as Lake Grove Trail, formerly called In-
diana Avenue. They still took the Tourist to their cottage, but now they would disembark at the Baer’s Den Hotel landing instead. It is this new cottage, humorously dubbed “Nod-a-Way” by Charles, that has remained in the family for 115 years and six generations. The Wilhoits’ daughter Catharine, a teacher, married Trammel Ice, a farmer from Mt. Summit, Indiana, and continued the Walloon tradition. Catharine and Trammel had a son, Richard, and daughter, Barbara. When Richard was in England serving in WWII, he fell in love with a petite, vivacious young lady named Joan Matthews from Devon, England, and promptly asked her to marry him. Joan came to America on the Queen Elizabeth, and married Richard in
