Park Township's 1937 airport is becoming a prairie

For more than eighty years, small planes lifted off a modest strip near Holland, on Ottawa Beach Road out by 152nd Avenue. The Park Township Airport went in back in 1937, one of Michigan’s earliest community airfields, and it kept on doing the quiet, unglamorous work of a little airport long after the era that built it had passed. No jets, no terminal — just hangars, a runway, and a few dozen people who loved to fly.

Right up to the end it was a real, working airport. In 2019 it served sixty-three pilots from nineteen states, a lot of them locals dodging the busier runways at the bigger fields nearby. It ran programs for middle and high schoolers and hosted Civil Air Patrol cadets — the kind of place where a teenager might catch the flying bug for life.

But keeping an old airport airworthy isn’t cheap. New pavement, lighting, taxiway work — the bills ran past a million dollars, and the township put the question to its voters. When the money didn’t come together, the township decided in 2020 to close the runway for good. The small planes had to find somewhere else to land.

Now the strip is getting an unexpected second life: native shortgrass prairie. The township is reseeding more than thirty acres with big bluestem, black-eyed Susans, and purple coneflowers — grassland that needs no mowing and no watering, with the first full bloom expected in the summer of 2027. So the open ground that once launched Cessnas into the lakeshore sky will keep being open ground, just lower to the earth — trading the hum of a propeller for the buzz of bees over the coneflowers.