Stormy Lake History
We acknowledge that this lake and the surrounding forests are the ancestral home of the Anishinaabe and Ojibwe peoples who lived on and cared for these lands for thousands of years. The Indigenous descendents of the original inhabitants continue to be our neighbors.
The lake was included in territory ceded by the Indigenous peoples to the US government in the Treaties of 1837 and 1842 that relinquished property claims but retains hunting, gathering, and fishing rights.
The lake's earliest non-Indigenous name was apparently “Jack Laners Lake,” and appears on a land agency map published in1897.
The far southeastern area of the lake off of Denton Road was first settled in the early 1900s. Enos F (EF) Hayward (1866-1936), who obtained a homestead in 1901 on Haymeadow Creek near Rummels Road north of Conover, built a cabin on a tract of land on the lake in about 1918. The site was used for 300 Camp Fire Girls for summer camp in 1921. Hayward, who was known as ”The Poet of the Pines,” published a book entitled, Poems from the Northwoods. He sold the property in about 1927; one of the real estate ads he ran in the mid-1920s is below.
Other families moved in nearby. A 1946 US Geological Survey map shows nine structures on the lake, all on Denton Road. East Stormy Lake Road was developed. By 1950, buildings had appeared on the newly developed south end of West Stormy Lake Road. Two cabin resorts—Stormy Lake Resort on Baker Lake Road and Debruyne’s Four Seasons Resort on West Stomry Lake Road—opened . The resorts flourished in the 1950s and 1960s, but were both sold off by the early 1970s.
In 1947, Wally Adams created a subdivision on the West side of the lake from Baker Lake Road to the tip of the point, creating the boat landing, thirty lots, and Stormy Point Road. West Stormy Lake Road was later completed by connecting Stormy Point Road to the road that accessed Debruyne's Resort.
The growing number of homeowners and a proposal to create a mobile home park on the west side of West Stormy Lake Road with "keyhole access" to the lake led to the creation of the Stormy Lake Association in 1977. As of 2025, over 200 families own property on Stormy Lake.
Stormy Lake Association past-President and force of nature, Nancy Wurmle, collected memories from as many households as possible in around 2012 and collected them here.
