Charles W. Chesnutt to Jesse B. Hutchins, 12 June 1922
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June 12, 1922.
Mr. Hutchins,
Care the Drexel Club,
St. Antoine, Detroit.1
Dear Sir:
I am informed that you have a vacant cottage at Idlewild.2 If this is true, and you would like to rent it, please let me know immediately and state how much rent you would want. We would like it for the month of August.3
Yours very truly, Address me at: 9719 Lamont Avenue, Cleveland, O.Correspondent: Jesse Benjamin Hutchins (1873–pre-1944) was the Black owner of a saloon on St. Antoine St. in Detroit, Michigan, in the 1910s. During Prohibition, he appears in the 1930 census as the proprietor of a billiard parlor with a home valued at $10,000. Like the Chesnutts, many of the more affluent Black citizens of Detroit and Chicago as well as of Cleveland began to rent and build cottages to summer around Idlewild, Michigan, in the 1920s. While it is not known whether Hutchins owned one of the early cottages built at the resort, his son Earl Hutchins (1903–1984) is occasionally mentioned in the local paper's Idlewild society column in the 1920s (e.g., see Lake County Star [Baldwin, MI], December 12, 1924, 2).
1. The Drexel Club was an organization for Black men, with headquarters at 310 St. Antoine St. in Detroit, Michigan, close to Hutchins's saloon. In the 1910s, the club is mentioned in the papers as a location for political meetings and visits by Republican candidates. [back]
2. After discovering Idlewild in 1921, the Chesnutts spent every summer at this location in Lake County, Michigan, about 380 miles west of Cleveland. Idlewild was a popular lakeside resort for hundreds of Black families from the urban Midwest from the 1910s to the 1960s, when racism excluded them from many White resort towns. In the spring of 1924, Chesnutt purchased a plot of land, and had a lakeside cabin built (14240 Lake Drive), which was completed in 1926. [back]
3. August 1922 was the first summer month that Chesnutt's family spent at Idlewild, Michigan, although Chesnutt's wife, Susan, and son, Edwin, had summered at the Black resort in 1921 while Helen and her father took an extended road trip. See Helen Chesnutt, Charles Waddell Chesnutt: Pioneer of the Color Line (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1952), 289. [back]
