When Chicago summered on Paw Paw Lake
A century ago, special trains delivered thousands of Chicagoans to Paw Paw Lake's hotels and dance pavilions; today the lake is Coloma and Watervliet's year-round backyard.
Around 1900, the hottest vacation ticket in Chicago wasn’t the Wisconsin Dells — it was Paw Paw Lake. Excursion trains and lake steamers delivered tens of thousands of summer visitors a season. They landed on the shoreline straddling Coloma and Watervliet townships. Dozens of hotels and boarding houses, dance pavilions, a midway, and moonlight excursion boats turned a Michigan farm lake into a full-blown resort colony. Big bands played the ballrooms. Courting couples circled the lake on launches. Whole Chicago neighborhoods decamped here every July.
The grand-hotel era faded after the war years, as those things do. But the lake never gave back its crowd — it just moved in permanently. Today Paw Paw Lake is ringed with year-round homes and cottages. It’s an all-sports lake, the kind where the boats come out the first warm Saturday and don’t go in until the ice does. The North Berrien Historical Museum in Coloma keeps the photographs and the stories. The Glad-Peach Festival each summer carries on the area’s knack for a good time. Resort towns make good hometowns. This one’s had a century of practice.
Where to see it
Paw Paw Lake between Coloma and Watervliet; the North Berrien Historical Museum in Coloma keeps the resort-era story.