Gwen Frostic's studio: a swamp she refused to give up

The low fieldstone building tucked into the woods on River Road, southeast of Benzonia, looks like it grew out of the ground rather than getting built on it. That was the whole idea. Gwen Frostic ran a print shop in Frankfort in the 1950s, and when talk started about draining the marsh across from Main Street to put in a marina, she did something stubborn and wonderful: she bought 40 acres of her own swamp inland near Benzonia so nobody could take the herons and frogs away from her.

The studio opened on April 26, 1964 — her 58th birthday. She built it of stone and timber from the site, let it ramble and sprawl as her business grew, and kept the woods and water pressing right up to the glass. Frostic was a nature artist who carved Michigan’s plants, birds, and bugs into linoleum blocks, then printed them on note cards, books, and stationery. She had taught herself the trade after polio left her hands and speech affected, and she turned it into a real living — selling around half a million dollars of paper goods a year by her peak.

The machines doing the printing are the showpiece. She fell hard for the Original Heidelberg platen press, the clamshell-style workhorse printers nicknamed “the prince of presses,” and ended up owning more than a dozen of them clattering away under one roof. You can still walk in, watch the presses stamp out her blackbirds and trilliums, and buy a card pulled fresh off a block she carved decades ago.

Frostic died in 2001, but the shop kept running, and in 2021 the studio she built was added to the National Register of Historic Places — a swamp she wouldn’t sell, now a landmark.