Seven Islands: when Grand Ledge had a roller coaster over the river

A roller coaster once ran out over the Grand River at Grand Ledge, leaping the water between two islands. It went up around 1891, and people say it was the first one built in Michigan.

This was the heart of the Seven Islands Resort, a Victorian getaway strung across the chain of small islands in the river downtown. It started small. In 1872 a man named John Burtch launched a little steamer he called the Dolly Varden and put up a plank hotel, betting that people would pay to come see the river and the famous sandstone ledges. They did. Later owners kept building. S.M. Hewings raised the Island House Hotel — 144 feet long, with a ballroom on the second floor — and Julian Scott Mudge added a casino, a strange pagoda-shaped tower the locals nicknamed “Mudge’s Folly,” and that water-jumping coaster.

At its peak the resort pulled in something like 70,000 visitors a season, second only to Petoskey among Lower Michigan getaways. They came by excursion train and packed steamers with names like the Gertie and the Lanota for a slow turn around the islands. Bands played. Couples danced upstairs at the Island House while the river slid by underneath.

Then the automobile arrived, and the whole thing quietly fell apart. Once a family could drive wherever it liked on a Sunday, a fixed spot on one river couldn’t hold them. The city bought the property in the late 1930s, and the grand hotel eventually came down.

What’s left is Island Park, still reachable by footbridge, still hosting summer band concerts the way the resort once did. Stand on the island on a warm evening and it’s easy to forget that a coaster full of shrieking passengers used to come barreling over your head.