Edsel Ford's country retreat is now a state park: Haven Hill

A toboggan run once dropped down this hillside in Highland Township. It was fast enough to thrill the family that owned the place: the Fords. In the 1920s Edsel Ford — Henry’s only son, and the man actually running Ford Motor Company — bought up land here. He built a hilltop lodge he called Haven Hill. It was the family’s escape from Grosse Pointe. It came with the trimmings: a swimming pool, stables, a working farm, that toboggan slide. The lodge itself burned in 1999. But the foundations and outbuildings still sit in the woods like a story half-erased.

Edsel died young in 1943. Three years later his widow Eleanor sold the estate to the state of Michigan. It folded into what is now the Highland Recreation Area: better than a dozen small lakes, a swim beach, and campgrounds. The miles of trail are rough enough that mountain bikers and horseback riders both lay claim to them.

The Ford name is the hook, but the real prize is botanical. Haven Hill’s 700-some acres squeeze every major southern-Michigan forest type into one compact place. There’s beech-maple climax forest, dry oak-hickory ridges, and cedar and tamarack swamps in the low ground. All of them grow within an easy walk of one another. That density is rare. It’s why the National Park Service named it a National Natural Landmark in 1976 — one of only a handful in the state.

So you can stand where an auto heir once watched a toboggan fly. Then you can walk fifteen minutes and pass from a sunny oak ridge into a black, soggy tamarack bog. You never leave the same few hundred acres. Few parks in lower Michigan pack that much different ground into one quiet corner.