Middle Bass Club Historic District

Two short rows of wood-frame, stucco and shingle-sided cottages on Grape and Grove Avenues, together with a red brick pump house, make up this district on the western shore of Middle Bass Island in Lake Erie. The buildings come from the Middle Bass Club, which grew out of a boating and fishing association organized by Toledo men in 1872 and leased an acre of a grape farm in 1874. Membership was limited to 200 men, members and their guests ate at a communal clubhouse, and the cottages had no kitchens. Eventually about 30 private cottages were built; the clubhouse and other shared buildings are gone except the pump house. The surviving cottages show five phases of style, from simple Greek Revival-based forms through ornate Gothic Revival and Second Empire detail, Italianate, and Colonial Revival to early bungalows. The district is described as the only private recreational complex on the Lake Erie Islands and as a record of a largely forgotten way of life.