• Boathouses around the Cottagewood area in the 1890s were built with belvederes or lookouts on the upper floor, a perfect vantage point for spectators to watch the Minnetonka Yacht Club's sailboat races.
Boathouse fun facts
May 20, 2017 at 1:25PM
• Many of the first boathouses were wet-slip style to allow driving the boat into a water garage. Now only a handful of the nearly 400 boathouses on Lake Minnetonka endure as wet-slip style.
• Elizabeth Quinlan, co-founder of the Young Quinlan department store in Minneapolis, was one of the early residents of a Gothic-style cottage in the Maplewoods neighborhood of Woodland. The current owners have transformed the property's pumphouse into a nautical-themed beach house.
• Around the turn of the century, many boathouse roofs were modified or built to incorporate the Asian-inspired, Chinoiserie-style roofline.
• Wayzata is the only lakeside community that allows the building of a new boathouse on the Lake Minnetonka shoreline.
• Smith's Bay is the only part of Lake Minnetonka that has no boathouses on its shoreline.
• The Minnesota Boat Club, a rowing club on Raspberry Island in St. Paul, inspired an 1880s Victorian-style boathouse on Lake Minnetonka's Casco Point.
• The oldest surviving boathouse, built in 1875, is on the property of the oldest house in Woodland. It was converted from a pumphouse to a boathouse.
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Several home watch businesses joined together in the Minnesota Home Watch Collaborative to stay vigilant across the whole state.
