The stone beach house the CCC built on Budd Lake

The handsomest building in Harrison’s state park was put up by young men who were broke. Wilson State Park covers 36 wooded acres at the north end of Budd Lake, right at the edge of town, and its beach house is built of fieldstone and heavy timber by crews of the Civilian Conservation Corps between 1939 and 1941. The CCC was a Depression jobs program that sent unemployed young men into the woods to build trails, plant trees, and raise stout little buildings like this one. The design came from Ralph B. Herrick, a state-park architect whose work also shaped the beach house at Ludington.

Before any of that, this was a working sawmill. The Wilson Brothers ran a mill and a company store here in the late 1800s, back when the pine all around Clare County was being cut and floated out. When the timber ran low the land changed hands, was deeded to the City of Harrison in 1901, and turned over to the state in 1920. The park opened in 1927.

What that history leaves you is a rare thing: a state park you can walk to from a county seat’s main drag. Budd Lake spreads out in front of the campground, good for fishing and paddling, and the old stone beach house still anchors the swimming area like it was built to outlast everybody — which, so far, it has.

Pull a chair up on the beach some August evening, look back at that fieldstone wall, and you’re looking at the handiwork of men who were paid about a dollar a day and sent most of it home.