Orchard Beach State Park, where they moved a stone pavilion to outrun the lake

The name is honest: there really was an orchard up here. Orchard Beach State Park sits on a bluff a hundred feet above Lake Michigan, three miles north of Manistee, and apple trees from the old fruit farm still grow among the campsites along with trees the Civilian Conservation Corps planted in the 1930s. The view off the edge — straight out over open water, with stairs leading down to the beach — is the whole point.

This stretch started as a trolley-line picnic ground in 1892, back when a streetcar company hauled day-trippers out to the bluff. When the trolleys stopped running, the local board of commerce bought the land and handed it to the state in 1921. Then, during the Depression, the CCC went to work and built the limestone structures that still give the park its handsome, hand-laid look — a pavilion, a stone shelter, outbuildings. The state liked the result so much that in 2009 the park landed on the National Register of Historic Places, called one of the best-kept examples of a 1930s-and-1940s Michigan state park anywhere.

Then the lake came for it. Years of high water and erosion ate at the bluff until the prized stone pavilion was perched near the edge. So in December 2020, rather than lose it, crews jacked the whole heavy building up and rolled it 1,200 feet to safer ground, where it now sits a few hundred feet back from the drop. Moving a stone pavilion across a park is the kind of thing you do only when the alternative is watching it fall into Lake Michigan.

Come for a campsite on the rim, a sunset that fills the sky, and a stone shelter that has, quite literally, been around the block.