Grass Lake's stone depot, and the novel that named its park

The little stone depot on the edge of Grass Lake opened for business in December 1887, built of rough stone hauled in from a quarry near Ann Arbor. It’s a stout, low building in the heavy Romanesque style of the era, and for about sixty-nine years the Michigan Central’s trains actually stopped here. In 1911, seven of the twenty-one trains a day that rolled through town pulled up to let people on and off. Regular passenger stops ended on April 13, 1953, after which the depot got demoted to a flag stop — one train, only if somebody waved it down — until even that quit in 1956.

Then the building nearly died twice over. Empty and unwanted, it caught fire in 1980 and burned down to a bare stone skeleton, four walls and the sky. That could easily have been the end. Instead a local group bought the wreck in 1988 and slowly brought it back, roof and floor and windows, until the 1887 depot stood whole again.

The name they chose for themselves — the Whistlestop Park Association — comes from a book. Maritta Wolff grew up in Grass Lake, and in 1941, while she was still a young woman, she published a novel called “Whistle Stop” that became a national best seller and got turned into a 1946 movie starring George Raft and Ava Gardner. A small railroad town producing a hit novelist is the kind of thing that town does not forget.

So the depot you can visit today is a double resurrection: a building hauled back from a burned-out shell, wearing the name of a hometown girl’s best seller. The trains are long gone. The stone, and the story, stayed.