Sister Lakes: a Chicago resort town that grew a monster

The name covers about ten lakes scattered across five or six miles where Cass, Berrien, and Van Buren counties run together — though at the start only two of them, Round Lake and Big Crooked Lake, were the actual “sisters.” The whole little resort country grew out of a simple change in American life: by the 1880s ordinary working people had started earning enough to take a vacation, and once the railroad reached nearby Dowagiac, Chicago families could be at a Michigan lake the same day. Farms along the shorelines turned into resorts. Pasture frontage got cut into cottage lots. A cornfield county quietly became a place people came to be idle on purpose.

For eighty years that was the whole story — boats, beaches, fish fries, summer cottages handed down through families. Then came the summer of 1964, and the strangest few weeks in the area’s history. In June, a carload of farmworkers and a family south of Dewey Lake reported a hulking, shaggy thing — nine or ten feet tall, by the breathless accounts — lurching near a barn in Silver Creek Township. The Cass County sheriff was buried in phone calls from around the world. A beer distributor posted a thousand-dollar reward for the creature, then sheepishly withdrew it. Roadside stands sold “monster burgers” and hunting kits stocked with a net and a squirt gun. Chicago papers crowned the place “Monster Town USA” and had a fine time mocking the locals. The likeliest culprit, officials figured, was a black bear that had wandered down from the north.

The monster never reappeared, but it never quite left either — it’s still the thing strangers bring up when you say you summer at Sister Lakes. Come on a July evening, though, and the lakes look exactly like what they actually are: warm, shallow, ringed with docks, the kind of water a city family would cross a state line to sit beside.