Glory Years
The first inland steamboat ever to be equipped with electric lights, the City of St. Louis, was built in Wayzata in 1881 and began servicing lakeshore communities and resorts later that year. In the following year of 1882, the largest vessel ever to operate on Lake Minnetonka was launched and began similar service; the Belle of Minnetonka was 300 feet (91.44 m) long and could carry 2500 passengers.
The 1880s also saw the rise of grand hotels on Lake Minnetonka, the first of which was the Hotel St. Louis in Deephaven, Minnesota. The Lake Park Hotel in Tonka Bay, Minnesota and the largest hotel ever built on the shores of Lake Minnetonka, the Hotel Lafayette in Minnetonka Beach, Minnesota, soon followed. Affluent visitors from around the world, but particularly from the Deep South, came to spend summer-long vacations on the Lake for its beauty and temperate climate.
As the railroad expanded westward throughout the 1890s, many of Lake Minnetonka's visitors began finding new places to spend their summers, such as Glacier National Park and Yellowstone National Park, as well as North America's West Coast. This caused most of the hotels and steamboats on Lake Minnetonka to cease operations. During this same period of time, however, an increasing number of families began to own private summer cottages and permanent homes in the Lake's vicinity as the metropolitan area of Minneapolis–St. Paul expanded outward.
Read more about this topic: Lake Minnetonka
Famous quotes containing the words glory and/or years:
“Therefore when thou doest thine alms, do not sound a trumpet before thee, as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and in the streets, that they may have glory of men. Verily I say unto you, they have their reward. But when thou doest alms, let not thy left hand know what thy right hand doeth.”
—Bible: New Testament Matthew 6:2-3.
The Sermon on the Mount.
“It is now many years that men have resorted to the forest for fuel and the materials of the arts: the New Englander and the New Hollander, the Parisian and the Celt, the farmer and Robin Hood, Goody Blake and Harry Gill; in most parts of the world, the prince and the peasant, the scholar and the savage, equally require still a few sticks from the forest to warm them and cook their food. Neither could I do without them.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)