Jean Klock Park: a beach given in a child's name

The Benton Harbor lakefront most people know — wide beach, tall dunes, the long roll of Lake Michigan — is named for a little girl who never got to see it. Jean Klock died in infancy. In 1917, just as the country was entering World War I, her parents gave the beach away in her memory.

John Klock had built himself up from nothing — he was setting type in a print shop at eleven and owned Benton Harbor’s News-Palladium newspaper by his twenties. He and his wife, Carrie, bought roughly ninety acres of prime shoreline and handed the deed to the city. About four thousand people turned out for the dedication that July. Carrie wanted the children of the city to have somewhere of their own; John wanted to be sure an ordinary family could always reach Lake Michigan without anyone’s permission.

They wrote that wish straight into the deed. The land, the Klocks specified, “shall forever be used for bathing beach, park purposes, other public purposes, and all time shall be open for the use and benefit of the public.” That single sentence has done a lot of work over the years. The park predates Michigan’s whole state-park system, which didn’t take shape until the early 1920s, making it one of the oldest public parks in the state — and that “forever … open to the public” language has been the thing residents pointed to every time a piece of the dunes looked like it might slip into private hands.

So when you walk down to the water here, you’re standing on a promise a grieving couple made more than a hundred years ago: that this beach would belong to everybody’s children, since theirs couldn’t have it.