Charles Mears State Park: a daughter's gift of beach

The sand at the north edge of Pentwater is public for one reason: Carrie Mears gave it away. In 1920 she deeded six hundred feet of her late father’s Lake Michigan beach to the young state park system, and that strip became the seed of Charles Mears State Park. The state grew it to about fifty acres, but the heart of it is still that bright run of beach where the Pentwater channel meets the big lake.

Her father was the man the park is named for. Charles Mears came up the west coast of Michigan in the lumber years and worked it hard — he ran a string of sawmills and cut harbors into the shoreline so schooners could load planks bound for Chicago. In 1855 he dug the channel here, set his mill on the north bank, and ran a long pier out into the lake. The village of Pentwater grew up around that mill and channel, and the channel he dug is the same one boats still slip through today.

The park packs a lot onto its small footprint: a wide swimming beach, a campground close enough that you can fall asleep to the surf, and a low dune called Old Baldy you can climb for the long view. There is a fishing pier on the channel where people drop lines for perch and salmon and watch the boat traffic come and go.

What it is really known for is the end of the day. The whole beach faces due west, and on a clear evening the crowd quietly drifts toward the pier to watch the sun drop into Lake Michigan — a small daily ritual on ground a lumberman’s daughter decided should belong to everyone.