The Door County Photographs of Ferdinand Hotz - Image Gallery Essay
Spring, 1916
Gibraltar, Wisconsin. A cow lies along the road outside a fence; two calves lie behind the fence under blooming cherry trees. The road is identified as Sturgeon Bay Road, now Highway 42. View the original source document: WHI 93293
Portrait of the Photographer Ferdinand Hotz, 1888
Chicago, Illinois. Quarter-length portrait of the photographer Ferdinand Hotz as a young man. View the original source document: WHI 96866
This remarkable collection of photographs taken by German immigrant and successful Chicago jeweler and merchant, Ferdinand Hotz, documents one of Wisconsin's most popular tourist regions just as it was evolving from farmland into a vacation destination. His earliest Door County photographs are from a family trip by steamer to Fish Creek about 1908, but most date from the 1920s. They document his landholdings, including the Fish Creek and Europe Lake cottages, Gibraltar Orchards and many other locations, as well as his daughters, Alice, Helen and Margaret, and son Ferdinand Leonard (Fedy). The Hotz collection reveals Door County as it was at the turn of the 20th century, with unimproved roads and clusters of small dwellings on the shores of working harbors. The collection also documents the peninsula's many picturesque lighthouses.
Cherries in Bloom, 1919
Fish Creek, Wisconsin. Clothilde Schmidt Hotz, wife of photographer, jeweler, and land owner Ferdinand Hotz, admires the cherry trees in bloom at Gibraltar Orchards in Door County. View the original source document: WHI 94786
Hotz Becomes Door County's Largest Landowner
Hotz first visited Door County as a tourist in 1905, after which his family made annual visits from their home in Glencoe, Illinois, to a German-owned resort in Fish Creek. Soon he was buying his own property in the area, including the Gibraltar Orchards, a beachside cottage, tracts of farmland and a hilltop pasture overlooking Fish Creek Harbor and the village where he built a compound of rustic cottages designed by Chicago-area architect Lawrence Buck.
After Peninsula State Park opened nearby in 1910, the area saw many more visitors, and Hotz relocated further north. He built a second cottage on Europe Lake, in the town of Liberty Grove, where he had acquired more than 10 miles of Lake Michigan shoreline. By the 1920s he was Door County's largest landowner. Hotz's 1,400 acres of shoreline were later combined with other tracts to form the 2,400-acre Newport State Park.
The Society Acquires the Hotz Collection
Hotz's grandson, G. Leonard Apfelbach, donated more than 500 negatives, created by Ferdinand Hotz with his Kodak 3A camera, to the Wisconsin Historical Society. Apfelbach loaned other materials, including a family album of enlarged and tinted prints, for scanning. Hotz's granddaughter, Mary Uhl, allowed selections from her collection of his jewelry design drawings to be scanned as well. The drawings reflect the fashion trends of the times with Edwardian and Art-Deco designs. A sample page from his stock book documents several of his well-known clients, including Herbert Uihlein and Mrs. Otto H. Falk.
Ferdinand Hotz Biography
Ferdinand Hotz was born in Wertheim, Germany, in 1868 and immigrated to the Chicago area in 1884. Over the next eight years he became a successful jewelry designer and merchant. His customers included German-American brewers and industrialists as well as bankers and jewelers across the country. He invested his profits in real estate in California, downtown Chicago, rural Illinois and Door County, Wisconsin. Ferdinand Hotz died in 1946. His son Fedy continued to operate his father's jewelry business until his retirement in 1984.
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