A lakeside ballroom once drew Chicago crowds to a Pavilion Township park

For a few glittering decades, the west shore of Long Lake was where you went to dance. The Ramona Palace stood there — a lakeside ballroom and resort with a real dance floor, big bands on the bill, a dining room, and a sandy beach out front. The crowds were big enough that a railroad spur was run straight to it, and people rode in from as far away as Chicago to spend a weekend dancing and swimming on a small lake in rural Pavilion Township.

It helped that Kalamazoo was close and getting closer. In the late 1930s and 1940s a Long Lake bus carried city folks the few miles out to the Palace and its beach, so you didn’t even need a car to make a night of it. Orchestras played, couples danced under the lights, and a quiet farming township found itself, for a while, on the regional map of where to have fun.

The bones of all this were laid by the railroad. The Grand Trunk reached nearby Scotts around 1870 and turned a crossroads into a thriving village, and that same rail access is what made a resort on Long Lake possible at all. Pavilion Township itself was organized back in 1836, two years after Caleb Vorce became its first settler — long before anyone imagined big bands by the water.

The Palace is gone now, the way these grand old dance pavilions almost all are — outlived by the cars and changing tastes that scattered their crowds. But the spot didn’t go to waste. The west side of Long Lake where it stood is a public park now, run by the City of Portage, so the beach that once heard a swing band is still a place to spread a towel and get in the water.