Are Minnesota’s mom-and-pop resorts dying?

LAKE FLORIDA, MINN. — In 1924, Bob Dickerson’s great-grandfather went on a fishing trip. His doctor had told him he’d breathe better if he spent some time on Minnesota’s lakes, and so it was that he arrived at Lake Florida not far from Willmar, where a farmer kept a bunch of rowboats in a cow pasture. Dickerson’s great-grandfather, Jens, caught a slew of fish, watched the sun set, listened to loons and camped. The next day, he bought that pastureland. He soon built cabins, renting them for $15 a week.

On a steamy recent August afternoon, the final week of the 100th summer at Dickerson’s Lake Florida Resort, Bob Dickerson and his wife, Connie, took their customary spot at the lakeside picnic tables. A few of Connie’s homemade donuts remained from their traditional Sunday morning get-together for the week’s guests, where newbies meet long-timers. A woman who has been coming annually for three decades grabbed a bucket for the frog her grandson caught. Kids rocketed down the metal slide — a century-old behemoth Dickerson bought after the nearby one-room schoolhouse closed — and into the lake.

This place, Dickerson explained, embodies their life mission: Helping people slow down and focus on what matters. To Dickerson, true Minnesota resorting is barbeque and marshmallows and meeting lifelong friends, not golf and prime rib and Wi-Fi-connected cabins.

But what happens when Dickerson goes away? Will this place — which has meant so much to so many, one of only a handful of Minnesota’s lakeside resorts in the same family for a century or more — go away with him, like so many classic mom-and-pop Minnesota resorts over the past 50 years?

“My goal is to die at 104 at the end of this big dock, watching the sunset, listening to the loons, bouncing my last check to the local undertakers and giving my body to the U,” Dickerson said.

In the 1960s, the heyday of the mom-and-pop resort, there were more than 3,000 statewide. In the mid-1990s, when Dickerson served as president of the statewide resort association, there were 1,800. The number has dwindled to fewer than 700.

The mega-resorts — like Grand View Lodge Spa & Golf Resort in Nisswa, or Cragun’s Resort on Gull Lake in Brainerd, or Ruttger’s Bay Lake Resort in Deerwood — are part of the fabric of the state as well. And they’ve continued to go upscale, spending millions on renovations and adding large homes with granite countertops and bedrooms for everyone and more spa services and resort amenities.

Cragun’s recent expansion included the largest renovation project in the resort’s 85-year history and a $17 million golf course upgrade, including 18 new holes designed by pro golfer and Minnesota native Tom Lehman.

At Dickerson’s, there are no televisions in the 13 cabins. No Wi-Fi either. Mondays are community pizza night at the picnic tables. On Thursdays, Bob takes the children on a hayride to a nearby environmental learning center, and Connie builds a campfire.

“We want people to relax,” Bob Dickerson said. “To just decompress and talk to one another. Everything’s go, go, go; we want them to read books and play board games. We live in a day and age of so much strife and turmoil in the world, even pastors don’t take time to listen to you anymore.

“This is our mission field,” he said. “We listen. And we can tell story after story after story.”

***

Economic realities make smaller resorts’ existence difficult. Lakeside property values have skyrocketed, especially sought-after west-facing shores like Dickerson’s that frame perfect Minnesota sunsets. That’s increased resort owners’ tax burden.

The pandemic only accelerated demand for lakeside property as work-from-home habits allowed the well-off to escape city life. Passing on resorts to the next generation isn’t always attractive to members of the next generation; running a mom-and-pop resort won’t make you rich, and the work is nonstop. (“We operate 25 hours a day, eight days a week,” Dickerson likes to say.)

The Dickersons don’t have that option. They have no kids. Dickerson just turned 77; his wife is 11 years younger. They built a cabin at the resort as their retirement home, and they’re courting longtime guests to find a family — the right family, a family that’ll keep this place this place — to take it over.

Only a handful of families have passed a resort from generation to generation and achieved the century mark. Peters Sunset Beach Resort on Lake Minnewaska near Glenwood has been run by same family since 1915. Bug-Bee Hive Resort on Lake Koronis near Paynesville has been in the same family since 1920. Pine Park Resort on Island Lake near Park Rapids has been going strong since 1920.

In Dalton, near Fergus Falls, Mike Schultz’s great-grandfather purchased Ten Mile Lake Resort on Ten Mile Lake in 1906. Schultz is the fourth generation; he’ll pass it along to the fifth generation soon.

Schultz has been frustrated with smaller resorts going out of business. Some simply can’t generate the income; Ten Mile Lake Resort was just big enough, with a restaurant, 14 cabins and 91 seasonal RV sites, that it continues to operate. He feels gouged by tax laws that appraise his property as residential but tax it as commercial. Since the mid-1990s, he’s watched warily as lakeshore property values keep rising and owners sell.

“And once they’re gone, they’re gone,” he said. “They don’t come back.”

As he spoke, he pointed out one camper who has stayed for one week per summer for more than half a century. Schultz can’t remember a summer without him.

“You become best friends with the people in the other cabins for one week out of the year,” Schultz said. “And you never miss that week.”

There are myriad reasons why smaller resorts close. Some simply go under. Others are partitioned into private homes, or purchased by one family for a lakeside mansion. Some turn into community interest corporations, where cabins are sold to individual owners while a homeowner association takes care of communal property; that’s the most lucrative option for resort owners looking to sell.

“How can you blame someone who worked 20 years and wants to retire?” said Thomas Bales, who bought the five-cabin, 33-campsite Swan Lake Resort & Campground near Fergus Falls three years ago. “Is that considered closing? It’s still a resort. It’s still got water toys and cabins.” But it’s something altogether different, Bales said, when a cabin is owned by one family rather than being rented to a different family each week.

Bales came from business consulting. He can see why the next generation might not want this life. Expenses are high; hours are long. He loves it — rescuing pontoon boats that run out of gas, saving someone in an overturned kayak, mowing lawns, fixing equipment, making his spot Instagram-perfect — but it’s not for everybody.

“You’re a one-man show with a lot of hats,” he said. “If those problems are just headaches, you’re going to get pretty frustrated. There’s something rewarding about working in the physical world after being glued to a computer for so long. I wouldn’t be doing all this planting trees and being meticulous on the lawn if I couldn’t share it with the 5,000 people who come through our doors.”

***

Jean Quam of Minneapolis, retired dean of the College of Education and Human Development at the University of Minnesota, has been visiting Dickerson’s Lake Florida Resort every summer since she adopted her oldest son. He’s 31 now, with two children of his own, and she waved at him as he walked out of the water and down the 450 feet of shoreline on a recent afternoon just before Labor Day weekend. Three rows of trees, maple and ash and a 150-year-old cottonwood, line the meticulously kept lawn by the beach.

Quam, who is 75, loves the familiarity of these lazy summer weeks. Kids running the beach, parents sitting at picnic tables, Bob telling corny jokes. The Dickersons take photos before families leave and mail them to each family around Christmas. The Quams have 30 of them framed at their home.

“It’s like one big family for the week,” Quam said.

The size, of course, also makes economic survival difficult. When Dickerson moved from the Twin Cities back to the resort near Spicer 48 years ago, there were 42 resorts and private campgrounds in Kandiyohi County, he said. Three remain.

Dickerson plans to run this place as long as he can. He had a succession plan once, gifting it to a religious organization, but it fell through. They’ve approached longtime guests to see if they’d be interested. A handful thought about it but declined. They’re still looking.

Not long ago, a developer offered the Dickersons $3.5 million to build condos here.

“I walked him back to his Cadillac and said, ‘Don’t bring anybody here like this again,’” Dickerson said.

Why not just sell to the highest bidder? Hasn’t his family — 100 years of welcoming others to their slice of paradise — given enough?

No. Dickerson does not want this “healing place” to become some rich man’s home.

“Because every Thursday night, when I take the kids on a hayride, at least one of them will sit next to me on the tractor seat,” Dickerson said. “They’re 7 years old or 10 years old. And they’ll say, ‘When I grow up, I want to bring my kids here.’”