Cedar Lake: a boarding school built a town

The thing that holds Cedar Lake together isn’t a factory or a county office — it’s a school where the students board, on a 400-acre campus a few miles east of Edmore. Great Lakes Adventist Academy is a Seventh-day Adventist high school, and the little farm community around it has been shaped by that since the 1890s.

The school on this spot, Cedar Lake Academy, was founded in 1898. For most of the next century it ran as a boarding school where teenagers lived, worked, studied, and worshipped on the same grounds — a self-contained world of dormitories, a dining hall, classrooms, and a church, set down in the middle of Montcalm County farmland. In 1986 the Michigan Conference of Seventh-day Adventists merged three of its academies into one and consolidated them here, on the old Cedar Lake campus, under the new name Great Lakes Adventist Academy.

A boarding school changes the place it sits in. Cedar Lake never grew into much of a village on its own — it’s an unincorporated dot on M-46, post office and all — but the academy keeps a few hundred students and a working community there year-round. The Adventist church on campus has a congregation in the hundreds, and the rhythm of the place runs on a Saturday Sabbath rather than a factory whistle.

It’s a quietly unusual thing to find in rural Michigan: a small denomination’s school that became the reason a community exists at all. Drive M-46 between Edmore and the farms to the east and you’ll pass it — brick buildings, ball fields, a church, kids walking between dorm and class — a town that a school built, and still mostly is.