John Gurney Park: a soldier's memorial that became a lakeside campground

The campground on the edge of Hart is named for a young man who never came home. John Gurney grew up here, went off to the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, and was killed in 1898 at the Battle of Santiago de Cuba during the Spanish-American War. He was twenty-seven. His parents, former state senator Theron Gurney and his wife Helen, gave land to the village in 1912 so the town would have a park carrying their son’s name.

In 1914 a local park association built the stone entrance arch that still frames the way in — a memorial gate you drive under without always knowing whose memory it keeps. By the 1920s the place had taken on a second life. The West Michigan Pike, the early auto route up the lakeshore, ran travelers through this country, and Hart turned the park into one of the auto tourist camps where the new motoring crowd could pull in and pitch a tent. A pavilion went up in 1921, water lines followed, and the family memorial quietly became a working campground.

The lake it overlooks is younger than the park. Hart Lake formed in 1925, when the Pentwater River was dammed for a hydroelectric plant and the water backed up into a long, calm reservoir right below the bluff. So the swimming, the boat ramp, the kids jumping off the dock — all of it sits on water that did not exist when the Gurneys first handed over the ground.

Today the city still runs it, dozens of sites strung along the shoreline under big shade trees. Drive in under that 1914 arch and it reads like any friendly small-town campground. It is also, quietly, the longest-standing thank-you a town ever wrote to one of its own.