16.489 acres
Approximate acreage
- The Wicker property
- Orchard Avenue, Lakeview, Ohio 43331
- Orchard Island, Indian Lake, Logan County
- B-1, commercial
- Being walked and surveyed
What was here
Before it was a field, it was Wicker Resort.
Frank and Isabella Wicker, of Cincinnati, took the property on in 1932. The hundred-room hotel already standing there had not survived the Depression, so they pulled it down and ran what was left: a fifty-room annex, cottages, a private beach with sand brought in, boat docks, a grocery, a restaurant and a bar, and a colosseum they turned into a roller rink. Isabella added a dining room onto the grocery in the early 1940s. The place was renovated in 1950, and three more cottages went up in the sixties.
Frank died in 1939. Isabella ran the resort for another fifty years, until her own death in 1989. A fire took her house on the property in 1979. Family kept it going a short while after her, and it closed in the early 1990s.
- 1912
- The Orchard Island post office opens on this ground.
- 1926
- It closes after fourteen years.
- 1932
- Frank and Isabella Wicker take the property on.
- 1939
- Frank dies. Isabella keeps running it.
- 1950
- The resort is renovated.
- 1960s
- Three more cottages go up.
- 1979
- Fire destroys Isabella's house on the property.
- 1989
- Isabella dies, fifty years after Frank.
- Early 1990s
- The resort closes for good.
- 1990s
- The buildings come down. The colosseum is moved to New Bremen.
- 2004
- The post office is moved to Post Office Island and rededicated.
- 2026
- Sixteen and a half acres change hands.
What happened next is why the field is a field. Jim Dicke, of Crown Equipment in New Bremen, bought the property and had the buildings taken down. The colosseum was dismantled and moved to New Bremen. Almost nothing was left standing.
One building survived, and it is worth knowing where it went. The original Orchard Island post office — fifteen feet by fifteen, open from the twenty-ninth of July 1912 to the fifteenth of November 1926 — stood on this ground. Isabella's daughters gave it to the Indian Lake Area Historical Society rather than let a court order take it down. It was moved to Post Office Island on the twenty-ninth of July 2004, ninety-two years to the day after it first opened. It was painted in 2015, refitted inside and rededicated in 2016, and re-roofed in cedar in 2017. You can go and stand in it.
So the honest description of this land is not untouched. It is a place that had a great deal of life on it, then had all of it taken away, and has been quiet for about thirty years.
What happens next
The answers do not exist yet.
Sixteen and a half acres of it changed hands in July. The intention is to still be here when somebody else's grandchildren are jumping off the docks.
It was marketed for commercial use. The sellers' own material talked about restaurants, bars and commercial recreation, and the zoning allows all of it. A resort could go back on this shoreline. A small number of homesites is going on it instead, and that is a deliberate choice rather than a limitation.
Thanks are owed to Teri Frymyer of Choice Properties Real Estate, who represented the sellers, and to the Indian Lake Area Historical Society, whose records are the reason any of the above can be written down.
The lake around it
What is within ten minutes of it.
A piece of ground is worth what is near it, and on this lake that list is long.
Breakfast is the walk-up window at The Donut Shop and Bakery on the Lake from half past five, or Gathering Grounds, which opens at six. Dinner you can arrive at by boat — Acheson's Resort, the patio at Cranberry Resort, Froggy's at the Lake, and the Tilton Hilton in the old ice house, which is cash only and always has been. THE Root Beer Stand for floats and coneys and a line of kids. Jac N Do's delivers to the islands. Chippewa and Moundwood keep the docks and the launches. Old Field Beach and the state park have the shoreline the rest of us borrow.
None of it is ours, none of it is being replaced, and none of it is being competed with. It is the reason people come.
