Watervale: a ghost lumber town that became a summer resort

Most lumber towns died and disappeared. Watervale, tucked on the neck of land between Lower Herring Lake and Lake Michigan in Blaine Township, did something rarer — it died, then came back as a vacation. Leo Hale started logging and shipping here in the early 1890s and platted a village in 1893: about 20 houses, a general store, a meat market, a post office. When the pine ran out, so did Hale’s luck. He went bankrupt around 1900, and Watervale slid toward becoming another emptied-out stump town.

Then a Chicago doctor named Oscar Kraft bought it. In 1917 he purchased the whole village and the land around it as a getaway for his family, fixed up the surviving buildings, and opened it that summer as a public resort. That accident of preservation is why Watervale still looks like a turn-of-the-century village instead of a parking lot — the old store, the inn, the cottages all kept because they happened to make charming places to spend a week by the water.

It has stayed in resort hands ever since. Kraft’s niece Vera Noble and her husband took it over in 1960, and Vera ran the place until she died in 2005. Michigan named Watervale a state historic site in 1991, and it joined the National Register of Historic Places in 2003.

Today guests rent the same frame cottages summer after summer, many families coming back for generations, with the calm waters of Lower Herring Lake on one side and a walk through the dunes to Lake Michigan on the other. It is one of the few places where you can sleep inside a vanished lumber boom.