The Portage Point Inn, the 1903 resort that outlived the steamships

The long white inn sits on the slip of land that separates Portage Lake from Lake Michigan, which in 1902 was about the most glamorous address on this coast. The Portage Point Assembly broke ground that year and opened the place in June 1903, with the big hotel and dining room finished by 1915. The pitch then was simple: water on both sides, a beach a short walk from your room, and a way to get there that didn’t involve a long, dusty wagon trip.

That last part is the piece worth remembering. By 1914 the inn was a stop for the steamers of the Northern Michigan Transportation Company, which ran guests up directly from Chicago and Milwaukee. You could leave a city dock and step off at a northern-Michigan resort without ever touching a road. The inn was also ahead of its neighbors on electricity — it ran one of the area’s first generators, and sold power to some of the early cottages nearby before the lines reached them.

The remarkable thing is that it’s still standing at all. Most of the grand wooden lakeside resorts of that era went the same way: they burned. Portage Point didn’t, and the complex grew into roughly fifteen buildings put up between 1902 and 1954, which is why a stroll across the grounds feels like walking through a half-century of summer architecture at once.

It still takes guests, and ownership has poured money into keeping the old bones sound. Sit on the porch at dusk with Portage Lake on one side and the big-lake horizon on the other, and it’s easy to see why people once crossed an entire lake to get here.