Lakeport State Park and its Depression-era beach house

The beach house you change into your swimsuit at Lakeport State Park was built by young men who were paid about a dollar a day. In the depths of the Great Depression, a Civilian Conservation Corps camp set up here and put up the stone-and-timber bathhouse and much of the campground, work that has outlasted three or four generations of swimmers. The park itself came together in the 1930s and opened under a name that kept getting it confused with the city — first Port Huron State Park, then renamed Lakeport to point people at the lake instead of the town.

It sits along M-25 on Lake Huron’s edge in Burtchville Township, north of Port Huron, and it comes in two pieces split by the little unincorporated village of Lakeport. Between them they hold better than a mile of shoreline — sand in places, smooth-rounded cobbles in others, the kind of beach where you walk along watching for a Petoskey stone or a flat skipper. This is the open Lake Huron coast of the Thumb, so the water is honest about its temperature and the horizon is all water; on a clear day you can sometimes pick out the long shape of a freighter standing out in the lake.

The day-use side is the draw for most: a wide beach, picnic shelters, and that old CCC bathhouse. The campground sits on the other unit, set back in the trees with a short walk to the water. It’s an easy hour-or-so trip up the shore from the city, which makes it the closest real Lake Huron beach for a lot of southeast Michigan, and a quieter one than the big-name parks farther up the Thumb. Bring the cobble-hunting eyes and a sweatshirt for after sundown — the breeze off open water doesn’t quit just because it’s July.