The lumber town a Yale professor turned into a museum

Most Thumb lumber towns simply disappeared when the trees ran out. Huron City almost did the same — and then a Yale English professor stepped in and kept the whole village instead. Langdon Hubbard built his fortune cutting the pine along this stretch of Lake Huron east of Port Austin, and in the early 1880s he put up a rambling Victorian house on the bluff above the water. It got its name from a houseguest: William Lyon Phelps, who married Hubbard’s daughter Annabel in 1892, called it Seven Gables after the Nathaniel Hawthorne novel, and the name stuck.

Phelps was no ordinary in-law. He was one of the most popular literature professors in the country, a household name in his day for his radio talks and newspaper columns. He spent his summers up here writing and preaching at the little Huron City church, where crowds packed the pews to hear him. When he died, his niece carried on the work, and in 1946 the family set up a foundation to save the town. They built a museum and restored the old store, the hotel, and the church. They even hauled in the Pointe aux Barques life-saving station to keep it from being lost.

The result is a village that stopped aging around 1890. You can walk through Seven Gables with its original furnishings and step into a general store stocked like a frontier shop. You can see the inn where stage passengers once stayed, and stand in the church where the professor held forth. It is open only a few months a year, run by a small foundation, and easy to drive past without noticing.

That is the strange charm of it. A boomtown that should have vanished is still standing, more or less, because a man who taught Browning and Shakespeare liked spending his Augusts here.