Hillside Waterfront Hotel

stick trying to hit that goose as it went by. He never did hit the goose, and the guy got the goose again and stuck him in the bag.

But they had this machine there that had a bear on it, had a little eye on it. So we thought we would shoot and see who shot the worst, would have to buy a drink. So we all got out there with this gun, this ray gun and we’d shoot and got special marks or whatever it was. So Jerry Burress, he just couldn’t seem to hit that bear at all. So he had to buy and buy and buy and buy. So he said, “I will be right back.”

He was gone for a little while and pretty soon he came in and said, “Now I’m going to shoot my own gun.” He shot this gun, a thirty-aught-six. Boom! Went right through the machine, through the wall. Earl threw the whole bunch of us out. But it was fun.

From the just-published book Stories From Yesteryear by Elaine Johnson. Available at Al Johnson’s Swedish Restaurant & Butik in Sister Bay.

Hillside Waterfront Hotel was started by Norwegian immigrants Martin and Maria Oleson and family, who purchased a four-room log cabin from Reverend Andreas Iverson in 1866. Over the years, the family built additional bedrooms and began renting these rooms out to guests in the summer of 1893. Additions over the years allowed for more and more guest accommodations and in 1901, the building officially became named the Hillside Hotel.

The Historic Hillside Waterfront Hotel of Door County is now on the National Register of Historic Places as one of the first hotels in Ephraim, as the area transitioned from lumber and fishing to tourism. It included the wooden hotel, cottages and outbuildings, with one structure built as early as 1864. A one-story porch with turned wood columns and a plain wood balustrade spanning the entire front of the hotel was built in 1908 and still exists today as part of the largest porch in Door County. In 2002, it was remodeled by Jim and Claire Webb with close attention paid to maintaining the original integrity of the outside structure while becoming a luxury historical Door County hotel with all of the amenities of a boutique hotel. It closed in 2010 and was reopened by current owner, Diane Taillon, in 2016.