Lakeside Wheel Club

Bloemendaal, originally the Lakeside Wheel Club, is a clubhouse in Richmond, Virginia built by Lewis Ginter in 1894. Ginter built it as a wheel club, a gathering place for bicyclists. His niece, Grace Arents, inherited it after his death in 1913. It became known as Bloemendaal. It is now part of the Lewis Ginter Botanical Garden. Bloemendaal means valley of flowers.

As a wheel club it was reached by the Missing Link Trail, which ran parallel to the Boulevard and Hermitage Road. Non-riders used the Lakeside Trolley. The clubhouse served "freshly made" ice cream. Ginter developed Lakeside Park around the clubhouse including a zoo and a public nine-hole golf course.

The Richmond Times-Dispatch described in on March 15, 1896 as: "Within the enclosure are two large sheets of water, the clubhouse of the Lakeside bicycle club, a casino, cafe, bowling alley, billiard rooms, deer house, park office, and apartments for officers. The lake...specially stocked with fish...[is] supplied with an abundance of rowboats and a speedy two-horse power naptha launch." It is now the Jefferson-Lakeside Country Club.

Grace Arents remodeled the building and had a second story added. It was used as a convalescent home for Richmond's sick children. After the founding of the Instructional Visiting Nurses Association, the convalescent home was no longer needed. Arents and Mary Garland Smith moved into the mansion and named it Bloemendaal in homage to the Ginter family's Dutch ancestors (Bloemendaal means "valley of flowers" and she planted gardens on the property). She died in 1926 and left the property to the City of Richmond with the stipulation that after Smith died it was to be developed in a botanical garden honoring Lewis Ginter.

Smith died in 1968 at the age of 100. The city of Richmond took possession of the property and it "languished". The property and its gardens were rescued by botanists, horticulturists and passionate citizens who formed the Lewis Ginter Botanical Garden, Inc.

Upon Lewis Ginter’s return to Richmond from Australia, the Major began acquiring additional land on Richmond's northside. He created the Lakeside Wheel Club on the land he bought four years earlier. The clubhouse he built was a one-story Victorian structure surrounded on two sides by a covered veranda. The original concrete approach walks with their inlaid leaf patterns, the steps, concrete newel posts and wrought iron lamp standards remain today. The adjacent valley and waterways had long been the site of a millpond and were dammed to create Lakeside Lake.

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