The lake cabin. Early mornings on the sleeping porch, lunches on the dock, late-night cleanings in the fish house.

Popular photographer Doug Ohman and renowned writer Bill Holm highlight the state’s unique and treasured cabins in“Cabins of Minnesota,” published by the Minnesota Historical Society Press.
The following is an edited excerpt from the vividly illustrated hard cover book featuring the Oberholtzer cabins on Mallard Island in Rainy Lake, a place where Holms has spent time personally .

“...Over his long life, Oberholtzer had many adventures and many passions. He explored the Rainy River drainage north through Manitoba to Hudson Bay with his Ojibwe friend and explorer Billy Magee. He produced the first maps of the area. He learned the Ojibwe language, collected folklore and a primitive life now lost forever. He became a political activist, traveling, testifying, and writing endless essays and letters to save the Rainy Lake and River wilderness from being dramatically changed by damns that would produce and sell electricity and denude the North of timber and animal life. After many year’s work, he succeeded in the late thirties in halting this insane development.
Oberholtzer was a kind of premature hippie, a well-educated Harvard man who refused to get a steady job, join the middle class, or to concern himself with making money. He lived, as the cliche has it, from hand to mouth, beholden to no one — though he never refused gifts. ...But it is his career as a builder and connoisseur of cabins that interests me here. Though he came of real estate-selling stock, Oberholtzer had no interest in owning anything that he couldn’t carry with him in a pack or a canoe. He must already have started accumulating books, and he always traveled with his “everyday” violin, but stashed his “Sunday” violin somewhere safe...(You never know if you are on the water when you might need a line or two of a Mozart sonata or a Bach fugue. Keep the fiddle handy.)
Oberholtzer came into his real estate empire just after World War I. A local developer named Hapgood tried to start a “farm resort” on Deer Island in Rainy Lake. He hired Oberholtzer to assist him. When the scheme failed, Hapgood owned Oberholtzer seventy-five dollars, but in lieu of payment gave him the deed to three tiny islands among the hundreds in Rainy Lake. On county maps they were called the Review or Japanese Islands, but Oberholtzer rechristened his three skinny sardines of bare rock and scrub timber by their old Indian names: Hawk, Mallard, and Crow. In 1920, he began his impressive collection of cabins—eventually nine in all—on Mallard, the middle and smallest of all three. The island itself is 1,200 feet long and in places only 50 feet wide. The Hawk and Crow remained uninhabited — guardian islands. Narrow channels in the lake separated the three.
(1) First he built the “Japanese House,” a little one-room pavilion with a veranda. It faces east, into the sunrise (the islands lie roughly on an east-west axis: sunrise to sunset, a metaphor for the day). The Japanese House in fact occupies its own separate rock connected to Mallard by a narrow footbridge.
(2) Oberholtzer bought an old lumber camp cook boat, the “Wanigan,” and moved it to the north side of the middle of the island. An old brass school bell summoned guests to table. Recycling of used buildings to new ends is a fine cabin tradition.
(3) He also bought an old floating brothel and gambling den that served the lumberjacks. He moved it to his island, and called it Cedar Bark House. It housed a battered upright piano, piles of music and several hundred books...
(4) He built a square, three-story “Bird House,” tall enough to peek out just over the tree tops...The bottom story was filled with Oberholtzer’s collections.  The other two stories were libraries and guest bedrooms, a couple of thousand books jammed floor to ceiling in every available cranny. The stairs are steep as ship’s ladders.
(5) Across from the Wanigan, he built a little two-story cabin he called the Cook’s House. The bottom story, next to the lake, became an artist’s studio because of its fine light. Many of Oberholtzer’s friends came there to paint. When he left the island after his senility, his friend, the late Gene Monahan, a well-regarded portrait painter from Ranier, took it over as her summer studio. Her portraits of Oberholtzer, both middle-aged and old, are lovely and full of character ...half elf, half sage.
(6) If you have sunrise on one end of your island, you need a west-end cabin, too. Oberholtzer called this the Front House. Its two stories house a few thousand more of his growing book collection, beds for guests, and a front veranda to watch the sunset. I can testify that is a fine place to listen to noisy loons and watch northern lights.
(7) He built  a sturdy “Boat House” next to the Wanigan, but after his death it was remodeled as a “Book House,” with more shelves to hold his unmanageably vast library...Oberholtzer was greedy—a biblioholic. He ordered books by the case. By the late ‘60s, fifteen thousand or so crowded every available space on the island... And such books! I found first editions of Thoreau, Mark Twain, Whitman, Hawthorne ...Mallard Island  became one of the major private libraries in Minnesota...
(8) In 1937, he built the “Big House” into the highest hill on the island. Its three stories included a large sitting room dominated by a big fireplace and two odd hanging decorations: a beautiful handmade wood canoe and an antique Ojibwe sacred drum, a gift from  Indian friends. In the middle of the room sits a vintage upright grand piano and piles of very good music: Mozart, Mendelssohn, Beethoven, Bach, even moderns like Debussy and Bartok! Oberholtzer’s “Sunday” violin rested in its case next to the piano...His well-worn scores of Bach give evidence that he practiced regularly.
(9) Finally in 1950, he built a heated and insulated cabin, the “Winter House...”  It’s the most boring of them—less wind whistling through the eaves, fewer loon tunes, less lake water always lapping. Maybe this magical island was never meant as a home for modern technology, only kerosene lamps, drafty fireplaces, and outdoor crappers....its only bathtub the lake on rare warm days.
Oberholtzer’s Mallard Island is still there, of course, mostly intact as he left it. It’s now administered by the foundation that bears his name. You can go there yourself if you have good reason to be there...  I’ve been there, loved every inch of it, disappeared into the library, made soup on his Wanigan stove and egg coffee in his white, church-basement coffeepot, practiced Beethoven, Haydn, and Bach in the middle of the night on both of the rickety pianos, watched dawn and sunset from both ends, fallen in love, and written romantic poetry on that island, but I shall probably not go again. Small cabins—and small islands with many cabins—are best loved in privacy and solitude (maybe with one or two particular others). I’ve had my turn. Now it’s yours if you want it.
Long after Oberholtzer became senile, in 1973, the local Ojibwe and other friends brought him back to the island for a ceremony to install a bronze plaque on the crest of his little cabin kingdom. “Earnest Carl Oberholtzer: For Fifty Years a Friend of the Ojibwe and Defender of the Wilderness.” I asked my friend, whose grandfather, a shaman, was one of Ober’s best friends, if he remembered being there for the ceremony and seeing the old man, then ninety. “His body was there, but his soul had already left.” What a lovely, delicate way to put it! And it’s true. Three years later, body and soul rejoined each other. Wherever they disappeared, I hope there are cozy cabins with music and a few books.

When Thoreau was dying—a good deal younger than Ober—his sister asked him if he had made his peace with God. “I didn’t know we’d quarreled,” said Henry. Oberholtzer might have said the same.