The Pulitzer-winning historian who grew up on Benzonia's hill

Benzonia sits up on a hill, and that hill once held a whole school. Settlers from Oberlin, Ohio, founded the village in 1858 as a religious and educational colony. The school they started grew into Benzonia Academy, a college-prep boarding school. It drew students from across the north for decades, then ran out of money and closed for good in 1918.

One of its boys went on to win the Pulitzer Prize. Bruce Catton wrote flowing books on the Civil War and became one of the most beloved American historians of the last century. He grew up here, after his father George became the academy’s president in 1906. As a boy, Bruce listened to aging Union veterans tell their war stories on these streets. He graduated from the academy in 1916, and he never forgot the place — his memoir “Waiting for the Morning Train” is mostly about growing up in this little Lake Michigan colony.

The brick building at 891 Michigan Avenue is the last piece of the school still standing. It went up in 1909, after a fire took the earlier dormitory, and it held the girls’ dorm, the dining hall, and the headmaster’s rooms. When George Catton ran the school, his family lived inside it, Bruce included. After the academy folded, the building became the Mills Community House — still a gathering spot and library for the village, and a Michigan historic site.

Across the street, the Benzie Area Historical Museum keeps Catton’s actual Pulitzer Prize on display, a few hundred feet from the rooms where a kid soaked up old soldiers’ tales and grew into the writer who would explain that war to the rest of the country.