The Oriole Tea Room was one of the tea rooms at Bay View, many years ago. We’ve owned this Victorian cottage since the end of 2019, and it’s no longer a tea room, although we do drink a fair amount of tea there!

Desperately seeking a photo or postcard of The Oriole Tea Room!

We don’t know when our cottage started being a tea room, but know that it was a tea room in the 1920s. We’ve found references to it in the Petoskey Evening News of the time. Thanks to the Bellaire Record, we also know that it was a tea room in the 1930s. It was still a tea room in the summer of 1941 too! Here’s a photo taken from Charles E. Schloff’s excellent book A Pictorial History of Bay View : Post Cards & Photographs of the Past:

Is that postcard still in existence?

We’d love to own a photo or postcard of our cottage when it was a tea room. We didn’t purchase the cottage until late 2019, so we don’t have the historical records that many of the families at Bay View have. We still hold onto the hope that we’ll find an old photo someday! We’d love to have a photo of the cottage “in the olden days”, so that we can frame it and hang it on the wall, for us and future owners to appreciate.

In the meantime, there are lots of photos of our cottage in more modern times on our Facebook page, as well as pictures of other beautiful cottages, and Bay View in general. If you have a collection of northern Michigan vintage postcards, and you recognize our cottage among your photos, please let us know!