3 minute read
Ponto Lake feature | Lakouting Club
FEATURE
LEFT TO RIGHT: Finding a place to anchor the Omaha Lakouting Club was an adventure all its own. A committee including Frank Seeley (left), 99 years later, Jim Hutchinson, Eva Hutchinson, Ida Huston, Susie Seeley, Kenneth Seeley and Parker Matthews drove all over the northwoods looking for a suitable place. Ponto Lake’s north Gunnar Nilsson and his truck “Myrtle” hold a special place in the hearts of many of the adult members shore remains the of the Lakouting Club who remember him as the caretaker of the grounds.
Photos from "Ponto:
Shangri-La of the north A Place in our Hearts"
BY TRAVIS GRIMLER
Tucked on the north shore of Ponto Lake sits a community formed nearly 100 years ago in the minds of a church congregation in 1922.
Members of the First Christian Church of Omaha, Nebraska, had gathered under the direction of Frank E. Seeley, later called the “father” of the club, to discuss a collaboration. Heather Hooper, a current member of the Lakouting Club by ownership of land there, said they may have been driven, in part, by the heat of Nebraska.
“Back in the 1920s, there was a group of families that were looking for a summer retreat, a place to go to commune with nature to raise their kids. You know, just that good way, and to escape the heat of the plains, which can be pretty brutal,” Hooper said. “And back in those days, there wasn’t air conditioning.”
“Ponto: A Place in our Heart,” the club’s history book for which Hooper provided copy editing services, reported that in the mid-1930s the heat in Omaha got so bad that school had to be canceled.
In 1922, Seeley shared an idea with the group. He was a regular vacationer to the Minnesota northwoods. While staying in Crow Wing County he became aware of a private club formed 20 years earlier by people from Lincoln, Nebraska, called the Pelican Lake Outing Club.
The church group met at Seeley’s home in the summer of 1922 and formed the Omaha Lakouting Club, with each member paying dues toward funding the club’s venture of finding and purchasing land.
The 12-member club included utility employees, a pastor, a dentist, an employee of the John Deere company and a casket salesman, among others. They worked for more than a year to form, but once the constitution and bylaws were created, a smaller committee jumped into Model T Fords and left on July 1, 1923, to find where they would lay down their roots.
They stopped at the Pelican Lake Outing Club to rent cottages while scouting real estate.
“I can’t imagine how many hours it must have taken on a rutted road,” Hooper said. “Not everything was paved drive from Omaha to the lake.”
They investigated several locations, including properties on Pelican Lake, an island on Woman Lake, land between Black Water and Mule Lake, and 130 acres on the north shore of Ponto Lake, which supposedly meant “little jewel” in some native tongue, according to “Ponto: A Place in our Hearts.”
Discussion was torn between those who wanted a clean lake for swimming and those who wanted a more murky lake for fishing. After the women in the group thoroughly turned down the island on Woman Lake, the men portaged to an undeveloped shoreline on the north side of Ponto Lake. It was a land
Mark Wilson, Lakouting Club member
