Adams Lake Memories: Adams Lake Traditions

Family and Local Traditions of the Lake

Adams Lake has its own series of traditions that happen annually. Ranging from lake-wide celebrations all the way to family traditions, many holidays and events are recognized and celebrated on Adams Lake.

My favorite tradition of Adams Lake, as I'm sure it is for many other people on the lake, is the Fourth of July. Typically lasting the entire week that Independence Day falls on, the activity and local population of lake comes to a peak every year. The lake itself becomes crowded with boats and rough with waves produced by the increase of traffic on the lake. This makes water sports such as tubing much more fun. Parties in the evenings around the lake become very common and fireworks can be seen and heard both buring the day and night. When the actual Fourth of July night comes, there is usually a great display of fireworks that go off around the lake put on by the locals of Adams Lake.

Another lake-wide celebration is Labor Day weekend. Every year on Labor Day, Adams Lake has a boat parade put on by the locals who decorate their boats with anything from the movie Titanic, Pirates of the Caribbean, and even the television show Gilligan's Island. The parade usually lasts thirty minutes to an hour and has judges for first, second, and third place decided by the Adams Lake Association. However, with this celebration it would always be bittersweet for my brother and I as it would generally mark the end of summer and a time to get ready to go back to school.

Memorial Day weekend is also another lake-wide celebration, typically being seen by boaters and lake-goers as the opposite of Labor Day, and the beginning of a new summer and lake season. This is a weekend my brother and I always looked forward to every year. Locals on the lake would be putting their boats in the water at the public access site and lake traffic would begin to surge.

The Fourth of July

These are boats on Sylvan Lake, about 5 miles south of Adams Lake, which I went to one year for the Fourth of July. Almost every boat on the lake headed out to the middle to watch a locally funded fireworks display that attracts many people from around the area every year. I've never seen so many boats packed onto a lake before like I did when I was here. Circa 2010.

My father giving my cousin a boat ride on his small fishing boat before the fireworks start on Adams Lake on the Fourth of July, circa 2005. This is one of my favorite pictures that I've taken at Adams Lake. It's so peaceful and serene looking and brings back a lot of nice memories for me when I was younger.

My cousin holding a sparkler the same year our relatives came up to the lake to celebrate the Fourth of July with us at our lake cottage.

Here, Joel launches a bottle rocket out of a pier support pipe like a bazooka. I apologize for the blurriness of this image as I was using a cheap digital camera in bad lighting.

Again, Joel is launching another bottle rocket from the pier support pipe, but this time like a mortar tube. Once again, the blurriness of my cheap digital camera plagues this image...

Going to Church on Sundays

Woodruff Grove United Methodist Church, the church I attended with my family for many years near Adams Lake.
Image credits: WoodruffGroveUMC.org

Something else I remember doing every Sunday is going to a nearby chruch about a mile and a half north of our cottage, Woodruff Grove United Methodist Church. During weekends at the lake, our parents would take us to church every Sunday. Of course, for just a young boy, I could barely focus in that church as I remember looking at the stained-glass windows, seeing how bright and sunny it was outside. I couldn't wait to get out of church, go home and eat a family brunch, then go out onto the lake for the rest of the day.

Closing Up the Lake Cottage for the Season

The Gloomiest Adams Lake Tradition

Every year after the Labor Day festivities, our family would begin the process of "closing up" the lake cottage for the year until the next summer. My father would do a series of different types of cottage maintenances while my mother would be cleaning inside the cottage and beginning to pack everything up. One of the things my father and usually with the help of my brother Joel is the process of taking out our pier and the little fishing boat my father so frequently puttered around the lake with. This process is illustrated below. Something else we would also do annually is take out our speedboat, later replaced by a pontoon my father had in the last few years with the cottage, and store it in his friends' barn who lived about 9 miles away from Adams Lake. This gave my brother and I the opportunity to ride in the boat out of the water as my father pulled it out of the lake and onto the trailer and brought it from the public access site back to our cottage for winterization and cleaning. After we dropped the speedboat off at the barn it was stored, the cottage was all cleaned, and everything was packed up, we'd leave the cottage and typically not return until Memorial Day weekend the next year. This annual process seemed to become a standard way of life for our lake-going family for many years.