I.W. Stevens Resort

I.W. Stevens Resort is a preserved cluster of resort-era cabins and outbuildings on Stevens Island in Namakan Lake. It is a day-use heritage stop where you can walk among buildings that were once part of a small Northwoods resort and later became one man's home. If you are already boating Namakan, it makes a rewarding short landing: the history is right there in the cabins, sauna and work buildings.

Look for Stevens' cabin, a guest cabin, sauna, woodshop and root cellar. The National Park Service says the historic buildings are open to explore. Follow the paths and interpretive signs between them, and take a little time inside as well as outside; this is a place to notice practical details, not just cabin exteriors.

There is no road access to the island. Reach the site by private watercraft or a water taxi, or join the National Park Service's Life on the Lake tour, which includes an island landing. Park boat tours usually run from mid-June through September, but schedules and offerings change by year. This is a day-use site, with no reservation or permit required and no overnight camping. Pack food and drinking water before you leave shore; the site-specific facility list names a dock, privy, fire ring and two picnic tables, with no food service or drinking water listed.

Before I.W. Stevens made it his home, the island was a retreat for the Virginia and Rainy Lake Lumber Company, whose founder Edward Hines used it as a getaway for lumber buyers. The company spared the island's pines from logging while nearby forests were cut. Stevens Island was once known as Hines Island, and those tall trees are part of the place's story as much as the surviving buildings.

Ingvald Walter Stevens was born in Norway and immigrated to the United States at 19. After working as a shoe salesman in Hibbing, he moved to Namakan Lake in 1932 and bought the island. Pine Cove Resort welcomed its first paying guests in 1937. At 74, Stevens gave up the resort business, but stayed on the island until 1979.

Stevens grew vegetables in rocky soil, picked and canned blueberries, ground wheat for bread, fished and hunted deer. He cut firewood, hauled lake water, and harvested ice for summer refrigeration. In his memoir he recalled canning 165 quarts of blueberry sauce in one early summer. It is a vivid picture of how much work a life on the island took, even after the resort business ended.

Stevens wrote about making cabinets and a floor-to-ceiling bookcase by hand, without electricity or power tools. That detail gives the cabin interiors a different feel: these were working rooms and a home, not just historic displays.

The path gives you a way to photograph the cabins among the pines; the dock adds Namakan Lake to the scene. Get closer for the red-trimmed windows and log construction, then step back to show how the buildings sit within the wooded island setting.