The Mielke Cottage was built in 1903 by Frank Edward Mielke, a dentist in Shawano. The building was very basic: walls that “breathed” (hence, no rotting), one big main room with fairly large dining room and big table on the northeast side, three bedrooms upstairs, a “lean to” kitchen on the north side with huge wood stove and ice box (the ice man came every morning), a pump on the back porch, and an outhouse.
Frank’s son Edward Frank Mielke brought his family to the cottage every summer in the 1930s and 1940s. His grown children and their families used the cottage as a summer vacation home throughout the following decades.
In 2003 Edward's youngest son William Connell Mielke started to modernize the 100-year-old structure. He built a new foundation for the cottage, moved the cottage back two feet from the water to adhere to zoning regulations, and built a 900-square-foot addition. To maintain the look and feel of the original building, he sourced native Hemlock trees and had them custom milled to the dimensions used 100 years earlier. The addition is fully insulated, but with an interior that mimics the basic construction of the original building, creating a unified look and feel throughout the cottage.