At the height of the postcard craze, each hotel on Lake Minnetonka, large and small, offered views of their grand architecture, their beachfront, or their packed porches and dining rooms. Summer tourists eager to show off their new-found wealth and leisure sent thousands of postcards to relatives, sweethearts, friends, and acquaintances. The views on the front of these cards tell us a great deal about what the ideal vacation looked like to turn-of-the-century visitors to the lake.

Picturing Lake Minnetonka is a tribute to those bygone days when life was just a bit simpler, a time that may now seem distant but, in fact, was not so long ago and not so far from where we are today. These views and the brief, often tantalizing, messages they bear provide a window through which we can see the Lake Minnetonka of the past.