The governor who signed state parks into being — and got one named back

There is a tidy bit of justice in the name of the state park northeast of Caseville. Albert E. Sleeper ran a bank and a store in Bad Axe before he became governor of Michigan from 1917 to 1919. During his term he signed the law that set up the Michigan State Park Commission — the act that gave the state the power to create state parks at all. Years later one of those parks, a stretch of Lake Huron shoreline in his own Huron County, was named for him.

The land itself came together before the name did. Huron County set the first acres aside in 1925; the state took it over as a park in 1927; and in 1944 it was renamed for the governor who made the whole system possible. By then the Civilian Conservation Corps had already left its mark — the young men of the CCC built the rustic Outdoor Center that still stands among the trees.

Today the park runs to more than 700 acres, but the half mile of beach is what most people come for. The Saginaw Bay sand is soft, and the water stays shallow and warm far out, the kind you can wade in forever. Cross the road from the beach and the land changes completely. Trails wind back through hardwood forest, low wooded dunes, and marshy wetland thick with birdsong. You can swim in the morning and lose yourself under the trees in the afternoon without moving your car.

It is an easy place to take for granted — just another good Thumb beach. But every state park in Michigan, all 100-some of them, traces back to a piece of paper a Huron County storekeeper signed in Lansing, and this is the one that carries his name.