"The Ojibway is an old place, not as far away from everything as it used to be. It's on an island just inside the outer shoals of the eastern edge of Georgian Bay. It used to be a long way off but is not so difficult to get to now. A few hours on a highway, a few minutes in a boat. And there it is.

It's as if the stone stairs and the gracious veranda remind anyone who approaches that time slips away, but that not everything slips away with it. Some things we hold on to. Summers are faster and noisier now than they were when Hamilton C. Davis first set eyes on the 42-acre island where he would build his hotel. But some things we manage to preserve. The weathered shingles, the expansive dock, the stately tower and the shafts of white pine are familiar enough sights to people who spend their summers in Pointe au Baril, Ontario. But the Ojibway is the kind of place that looks familiar even to people who have never seen it before. The creation of a courtly former railway agent from Rochester, New York, it was built in 1906 and seemed, even in the earliest days, to embody summers past.

Between the summer of 1906, when it opened as a hotel, and the summer 60 years later, when it stopped taking overnight guests, the Ojibway had its ups and downs. On the whole, its ups were long running - "comfortable furnishings, diligent service and a cuisine of the very highest standards" was the opinion of a travel writer in 1933 - and its downs were less catastrophic than those suffered by many of the grand hotels that once dotted the Muskoka region and the islands of Georgian Bay. The Ojibway never burned to the ground. It never wen't bankrupt. It underwent a minimum of the ill-advised "improvements" that were made in the name of modernization. It had its rough years - "poor iron beds, tepid water and very noisy at night," wrote one disappointed cottager after she dropped her mother off for a stay near the end of the Ojibway's hotel years - but it never fell irredeemably into disrepair.

Today it is no longer a hotel. It is a club operated as a social and recreational centre for Pointe au Baril's summer community, but the Ojibway holds close to the claim made decades ago in one of the hotel's brochures. The island remains"the centre of a group of other islands forming a summer colony of... families of the United States and Canada." And the Ojibway's front dock is still "The community's Main Street."

Excerpted from:

At The Ojibway - 100 Summers on Georgian Bay by David Macfarlane