Dr. B. W. Donaldson’s Lake Breeze Memories – Part 2

I got a little excited when I read Dr. Donaldson’s recollections of Lake Breeze and his description of where his family, along with several other steel company executives, spent the summer months.

That’s because this information may have solved a little mystery that I’ve been too busy to research.

You might recall in my post yesterday that Dr. Donaldson mentioned that Mr. Max Suppes, General Manager of the Johnson Company, built his summer home at Lake Breeze.

Donaldson also noted, “Just east of his cottage was a tract of land with an old hotel, four cottages and a dance hall on the lakeside of the dirt road leading to Cleveland.

“Mr. D. D. Lewis, a Superintendent of the Johnson Company, purchased this property."

We know from a November 1903 new item in the Elyria Reporter that the property that Mr. Lewis purchased was the old Lake Breeze House.

In his reminisces, Donaldson mentions how various executives, including one (Matthew Smith) that at one time was associated with A&P, spent their summers on the former Lake Breeze House property.

Well, reading about these executives enjoying their summers at Lake Breeze reminded me of something.

Remember my post about the former Jordan property in Sheffield Lake, and Gretchen, who was trying to research it?

Gretchen told me that the property consisted of a big house (below) with 17 rooms,  a water tower, a tennis court and stables.

She also told me that she had been told by someone who had once lived in the house decades ago that it had been "a summer vacation place for a soup company executives.”

Max Suppes

Could it be that instead of soup executives, it was an executive named Suppes?

The location of the house – if it was indeed the summer home of Suppes – seems to be correct. The “tract of land with an old hotel” was said to be just east of Suppes’ cottage – and the Lake Shore House was just east of the former Jordan property. Plus, if you zero up your odometer at Lake Breeze heading east, the Jordan property is exactly at 0.3 miles (with the Lake Breeze House said to have been located 0.4 miles from Lake Breeze Road).

So what does all this mean? I can’t draw any sort of concrete conclusion but there is a chance that the former Jordan house was once the summer home of Max Suppes. Hopefully as time goes on more research can be done to confirm this.

Wouldn’t that be souper?