Fort Custer: a WWI Army camp turned 3,000-acre playground

Stay on the marked trails out here, and not just so you don’t get lost — the park’s own warning is about buried explosives that may never have been cleared. This land trained soldiers for a war.

In 1917 the federal government threw up Camp Custer on this ground near Augusta to ready troops for World War I, naming it for George Armstrong Custer, the Civil War cavalry general who grew up in Monroe. Tens of thousands of men cycled through during the war, and the military held the property for decades after. Despite the name, no walled fort ever stood here — “Fort Custer” is the part of the old reservation the state carved off in 1971 for a recreation area of roughly 3,000 acres. The Michigan National Guard kept the training center next door, and it is still active, so the thump of helicopters and the far-off pop of rifle practice are part of the soundtrack when you hike.

What is left is one of the largest public playgrounds in the county. Three lakes — Eagle, Jackson Hole, and Lawler — sit inside the boundary, along with a run of the Kalamazoo River, a swim beach, and a campground. The mountain-bike trails are the draw most weekends; the system winds for dozens of miles through the rolling oak woods, and horse riders and hikers get their own routes. A Recreation Passport on your plate gets the car in.

Stand on the beach at Eagle Lake on a summer afternoon and it is hard to picture rows of barracks and a rail spur full of draftees. But the bones are there if you know to look — old foundations in the brush, the straight military road grid, the rumble next door that never quite went away.