Before Bridgman was a beach town, it was a sawmill that kept burning down

Bridgman is a Lake Michigan beach town now, but it started out smelling of fresh-cut pine and woodsmoke. In the fall of 1856, George Bridgman and his partners the Howes set up the Charlotte Lumber Company and built a big steam-powered sawmill near where Lake Street meets the Red Arrow Highway today. They even laid a little narrow-gauge railway out to the lake, with branches running off into the timber to haul the logs in. The settlement that grew up around the mill took the name Charlotteville, after Charlotte Howe.

The mill had one persistent problem: it kept catching fire. The first one burned in 1863. They rebuilt, and it burned again. They rebuilt a third time, and in 1870 that one burned too. After three sawmills turned to ash, the Howes had enough and moved on to other things. George Bridgman, though, stayed put — and the town eventually took his name instead.

Once the big trees were cut and the mills were gone, the thing that had been here all along finally got its due: the dunes. By the 1920s the Lake Michigan shoreline had become a draw, especially for Chicagoans riding up for the summer. Two locals, Henry Weber and Bruno Kolander, built a pavilion on the waterfront and mashed their last names together to christen the beach “Weko.”

Weko Beach is still the heart of the place — about 960 feet of sand tucked into forty-some acres of wooded dunes, with a campground behind it. The pine forest that George Bridgman came to cut down is long gone. What pulls people to Bridgman now is the sand the loggers never thought to sell.