How a sporting-goods store remade the village of Dundee

In 1999 the outdoor outfitter Cabela’s went looking for a spot in Michigan and picked Dundee, a farm village of fewer than 3,000 people where US-23 crosses the River Raisin. The store that opened the next August was enormous — about 225,000 square feet, with an indoor mountain, aquariums, and mounted game animals filling the walls — and it was built less as a shop than as a destination. People came from across the Midwest just to look around.

What happened to the village afterward is the real story. A place that size pulls millions of visitors a year, and all those cars needed gas, beds, and dinner. Hotels went up. Restaurants opened. An indoor water-park resort, Splash Universe, landed nearby. New subdivisions filled in, a medical center arrived, and the taxable value of property in town climbed by a figure local officials measured in four digits’ worth of percent. A village that had spent a century as a quiet stop on the Raisin became, by some counts, one of the most-visited places in the state.

It’s a familiar pattern in reverse. Usually a small Michigan town worries about the big-box store that drains its downtown. Dundee got the opposite problem and then some — a single retailer so large it dragged a whole highway interchange’s worth of development in behind it.

The old Dundee is still there if you look: the 1840s grist mill on the river, the brick storefronts on Main Street. But for a lot of travelers, the word “Dundee” now means one thing — the giant green-roofed store you can see from the freeway, the one with a trout pond inside.