Bay View, Michigan
Emmet County

Designation and Designation Date

• National Historic Landmark, listed December 23, 1987
• National Register, listed March 16, 1972
• State Register, listed June 5, 1957

Associated Person(s)

• Samuel O. Knapp
• John M. Hall

Significant Date(s), Notes

• 1876, the first Bay View Camp meeting was held.

Significance Statement

Bay View is one of the finest examples of two uniquely American community forms, the Methodist camp meeting and the independent Chautauqua. Designed for the first purpose in 1876 as the country's only romantically planned campground, and adapted for the second from 1885 to 1915, Bay View constitutes an extraordinarily well executed ideal Victorian community which, because of its continuing corporate existence and, most important, the ongoing collective values of its membership, remains in an excellent state of preservation of both form and spirit. Bay View is a major monument of American religious, cultural, social and educational ideals embodied in an artistically shaped community plan.

Founded in 1876 as a Methodist camp meeting and resort, Bay View is a religiously oriented summer community of 437 privately owned cottages, 2 hotels, and 29 additional structures, all belonging to the Bay View Association, which also owns the land and governs life in the enclave. Sinuous curving streets line natural terraces on the northern half of its 338-acre tract, terraces that cascade from a 200-foot elevation down to Little Traverse Bay. Cottages are mostly Victorian and are beautifully maintained. They sit with even setbacks on narrow lots, without fences and immersed in greenery, a clear evocation of the enterprise's communal purpose.

For information about any of the programs described on this site, write the Michigan State Historic Preservation Office, Michigan Historical Center, P.O. Box 30740, 702 W. Kalamazoo St., Lansing, MI 48909-8240, or call us at (517) 373-1630.