Lodge · Ely (vicinity), Minnesota · Built 1914; cabins c. 1917–1937
Burntside Lodge
Listed on the National Register as Burntside Lodge Historic District
A log resort on Burntside Lake near Ely, begun with a saddle-notched pine lodge in 1914; its cabins, built by local Finnish craftsmen, form the best-preserved group of early log resort buildings in northern St. Louis County.
History
The cove where the lodge stands was the lake end of an old portage from the Burntside River, a trail laid with planks over its wet stretches and well known to Ely canoeists. Rails reached Ely by 1890, and a road with a 350-foot wooden bridge over the river followed in 1901. In 1911 Phineas Terry Brownell, an Ely merchant since 1889, began running an outing company here with Thomas Miller, renting the site to campers. In April 1914, the same year a steel bridge replaced the wooden one, the Ely contractors Meitunen and Peterson started the main lodge. A garage of some 10,000 square feet went up that first season for motor tourists, and by 1916 the Ely Miner reported guests arriving on every train. The nomination treats the lodge as the start of the commercial resort trade around Ely.
After Brownell died in 1920 the resort passed to William Alden, who ran it until 1941. Through the 1920s and 1930s, Finnish builders from the district raised cabins from first-growth pine cut on the property or nearby, and masons laid fieldstone foundations, fireplaces and an owner's house. At its height in the 1930s and 1940s the resort offered 44 cabins and 14 rooms in the lodge. Mabel Normand stayed in Cabin 26 in 1924, and during the Second World War the FBI arrested a suspected German spy in the same cabin.
Ray and Nancy LaMontagne bought the resort in 1941 and the family kept it afterward. About half the cabins were lost over the years to fire or decay, but the core group was listed as a historic district in 1988.
“With its powerful combination of an excellent cove, a longstanding portage, a highway to the door, and a rail link to Ely (only 6 miles away), Burntside Lodge was blessed by geography.”
Architecture
The main lodge is built of round pine logs, saddle-notched at the corners, on a fieldstone foundation, and stained a warm orange under a glossy shellac. A gabled roof on exposed log rafters covers a rectangular plan: a portico and porch lead into a lobby whose huge fieldstone fireplace is two-sided, opening also into the lakeside dining room. Much of the lobby furniture is the original rustic work of the late 1910s and early 1920s.
The cabins show the range of the builders' skills: horizontal logs with 'cat' corners grooved to sit over the log below, vertical stockade walls on log piers, interior walls hewn flat with adze and broadaxe, and one fieldstone cabin that began as the owner's house. Cabin 27 of the 1930s steps down the shoreline on two levels and keeps its pine-and-birch-twig furniture.
What to look for
- Two-sided fieldstone fireplace between lobby and dining room
- Saddle-notched and 'cat'-cornered log walls
- Vertical stockade-log cabins on log piers
- Cabin 26 on its rock outcrop at the shoreline
- Original twig and pine-log furniture
Setting
The resort occupies a rocky, wooded slope on the south shore of Burntside Lake about six miles northwest of Ely, with a marina in the western cove and a sand beach to the east. Cabins sit wherever the ledges allow among pine, cedar, birch and aspen, and the Boundary Waters canoe country lies just to the north.
Timeline
- 1901Road and wooden bridge over the Burntside River reach the old portage
- 1911P. T. Brownell's outing company begins operating at the cove
- 1914Main lodge built in April and May
- 1920William Alden takes over after Brownell's death
- 1924Actress Mabel Normand stays in Cabin 26
- 1941Ray and Nancy LaMontagne buy the resort
- 1988Listed as a National Register historic district
Where sources differ
- Wikipedia says brothers William A. and Lyman Alden bought the property about 1913; the nomination gives Brownell as owner from 1914 to 1920 and William Alden from 1920 to 1941.
- The early company is called the Ely-Burntside Outing Company in the nomination and the Brownell Outing Company in Wikipedia.
- Individual cabin dates in the nomination are estimates ('ca.', 'probably predates 1920').
