At the close of the 1800s and beginning of the 1900s, it became very fashionable among wealthy Americans and others to have summer residences along the Great Lakes and St. Lawrence River. While the Thousand Islands region attracted the well-heeled of New York state, those from the US mid-west sought to establish resorts on islands accessible by steamboat on the Great Lakes. In 1898, H.W. Evenden, the son of a wealthy English draper purchased Campement d’Ours Island adjacent to the west-north-west corner of St. Joseph Island and built a large manor house. An eccentric, Evenden planned to bring Himalayan goats to the island and start a Gruyere cheese factory. He boasted to a newspaper of the abundant fishing in the area and the ease of flagging down passing steamers for transportation. Evenden sold the island to Arnold Scudder in 1902 who promptly began marketing several lots to wealthy Americans. As an attraction, he built a replica of the blockhouse on Fort Mackinac which was used later as a cottage by Michigan governor Chase Osborn. In 1900, Chicago merchant Edward H. Pitkin purchased Sapper Island to the west of Campement d’Ours Island and asked his neighbour Frank Lloyd Wright, then an apprentice architect, to design him a home. Completed in 1902, the 130 m2 Pitkin Cottage is one of only two, and the only surviving, buildings designed by the American architect in Canada. In 1916, the cottage was purchased from Pitkin by another Illinois businessman, James Heyworth.