CARVER BEACH  Chanhassen's lakeside retreat MORE PHOTOS (neighborhood & lake) Virtual Tour (coming soon) VIDEO (coming soon) A HIDDEN GEM. As a 9 year resident of the Carver Beach area of Chanhassen, I've always enjoyed its beauty and seclusion.  Each time I turn the corner into the neighborhood, I feel like I am entering an 'up north' woodsy retreat.  The area has an immense amount of character and personality.  Even though you're only a mile or two from downtown Chanhassen and all its wonderful establishments, Carver Beach still feels like you're a world away.  The roads  are winding and hilly, and there are thousands of trees.  And what trees!  Each fall the  mature oaks and sugar maples produce a spectacular display of color.  OUTDOOR LIVING. If you're someone who loves the outdoors, Carver Beach is a wonderful place to live.  Lotus Lake has two public beaches separated by a wooded lakeshore walking path.  It's a great place to go canoeing, kayaking, swimming, fishing, boating, water skiing, ice-fishing, snow shoeing, x-country skiing, and snowmobiling.     HISTORY. The fascinating story of Carver Beach goes something like this:  A newspaper promotion: FREE LAND!  That's right.   Back in the late 1920’s- early 1930's, the developers, Warren and Arthur Smadbeck,  gave you a 20 X 100 foot lot to go with your Star newspaper subscription.  "If you got so many subscriptions to the Star, you got a lot out there and they were small, only a twenty-foot lot instead of the normal forty foot or bigger.  The result was that there were an awful lot of small pieces of ground that were not owned by the same person in a group.  You owned one here and the next person would be from some other part and the result didn't lend itself to building too much."  Arnold Chulik...Chanhassen: A Centennial History. Warren & Arthur Smadbeck were known in the  as "The Henry Fords of Real Estate" for their marketing scheme of making vacation land/homes possible for the average buyer.  " In the 1920's Warren and Arthur started developing & marketing large estates 'out in the sticks' but near railway stations...Using newspaper subscriptions to sell land was a new concept and may have been the Smadbeck's original idea. "   (more about the Smadbecks from Ken Spooner)   According to John Freemyer of the Carver County Survey Office, the purchase of the newspaper subscription gave you the option to buy a lot.  "The Smadbecks targeted cities that had nearby lakes and recreational areas accessable by train."  John points out that being located nearby a lake was very desireable in the pre-airconditioning days.  How about that for green-living....surround yourself with majestic woods on the shores of a lake and never turn on the air!        WHAT'S NEW?. As you drive through the neighborhood you'll still see some of the orignal cabins/homes.  You'll also see that some of those homes have been remodeled and added to over the years.  Throughout the last 1/2 decade many of the small vacant lots were consolidated and new homes were added to the neighborhood.  A more recent trend is the tearing down of older structures followed by new million-dollar home construction.  Carver Beach seems to have avoided many of the issues with this kind of new and big development that have arisen in communities like Minneapolis and Edina.    * thank you to John Freemyer (Carver County's Surveyor) for sharing his notes, documents and research from his Carver Beach presentation.