Lexington's state harbor and the breakwall walk

The harbor is the thing that makes Lexington run in summer. Lexington State Harbor sits right in the middle of the village, 108 slips of protected water about 20 miles up the Lake Huron shore from Port Huron, close enough to walk from your boat to a restaurant, the grocery store, the theater, or the beach. It’s part of the state’s harbor system — one of the chain of “harbors of refuge” spaced along the Great Lakes so a boater caught out in weather always has somewhere to duck into — and it runs roughly early May through late September.

For people who don’t have a boat, the draw is the breakwall. A long pier reaches out into the lake to shelter the marina, and you can walk it. Out near the end you turn around and get the view the boats get coming in: the village stacked up behind the masts, the wide sandy public beach to one side, and open water everywhere else. Because this is the sunrise coast, the breakwall is where people come early to watch the sun come straight up out of Lake Huron with nothing between them and Canada but a hundred miles of water.

A word of honesty about the walk: stretches of the old pier and breakwall have been showing their age, with crumbling edges and railing on only one side in places, so it’s a stroll to take with your eyes open rather than a sprint. None of that has dented the harbor’s pull. On a warm weekend the slips fill, kids jump off the swimming beach, and the whole village tightens around this one little notch of sheltered water that has been the reason to come to Lexington since it was a lumber port.