 While the first summer cottage was built on Big Island by the Johnson family in North Bay in the early 1920s, there was very little development on the lake, and indeed in Haliburton as a whole, until the late 1930s, when the two great access highways from the south were constructed.Highway 28 in the east, and Highway 35 in the west, with Highway 118 later connecting the two.The War then delayed development on the lakes, and finally in the late 1940s, development got under way.