Long Beach is located on the north-east edge of Lake Erie, 45 minutes from Buffalo, New York. The water is great for swimming and very shallow for kids!

Moments from the cottages are golf courses, nature areas, historical sites, horseback riding and world famous wineries. For an afternoon of browsing for antiques, picking up a few supplies, or going out for a nice meal, the towns of Fort Erie, Port Colborne and Niagara Falls are all just a short drive. Niagara-on-the-Lake, Stratford, and Toronto are all within an hour and a half, so a day trip is always an option if you get bored of relaxing!

The Story of the Swift Cottages

The story actually starts even before there was a Swift, before our dad, Alan Swift, was married to our mother – Helen. Our grandmother, mom’s mom, needed a source of income and decided to renovate the farm house they were living in and rent out a portion of it to summer tenants. The first tenants were the McCLures from Lewiston. Catherine McCLure Gildiner wrote about staying here in her very popular book “Too Close to the Falls”.

That worked out well and when her finances let up a bit –our grandmother built the dark green cottage in 1952 (now the grey cottage).

Soon after that our mother and father married and even though our mother didn’t actually own the land yet – she and our father decided to build a cottage and live in it for the winter and rent it out for the summer. They lived with our grandmother during the summer.

Since they had no money, but lots gumption, they built a second cottage – the dark brown cottage (now the red cottage). They lived in that cottage for the winter and again with our grandmother for the summer.

Our grandmother was quite taken with the layout of the dark brown cottage, which our parents copied from a cottage near Rathfon Point and so she built one exactly like it – the light green cottage.

When our grandmother passed away, she left her two cottages (now the light green and the grey cottage) to our mom and in 2012 our mom gave her four children the 4 cottages. So now the cottages have remained in the family for 2 and 3 generations.