Whitmore Lake straddles two counties and used to be cottage country

Whitmore Lake doesn’t pick a county. The 667-acre lake sits right on the line between Washtenaw and Livingston, so its northern shore is in Green Oak Township and its southern shore is in Northfield Township, and the village wrapped around it has always lived with that split. The name goes back to 1825, when a surveyor named the parcel after a local landowner, Luke Whitmore.

For a long time this was a summer place, not a year-round one. Detroit and Ann Arbor people came out to the lake to escape the heat, and the shoreline filled up with cottages, hotels, boat liveries, and resorts. By 1940 the lake had something like 230 cottages, a hotel, a couple of resorts, and eight places to rent a boat — the kind of busy summer-water-town economy that ran on day-trippers and August weekends.

It’s an all-sports lake, which in Michigan terms means motorboats, water-skiers, and tubes are all welcome, not just the quiet paddling some lakes restrict you to. That makes it a loud, lively lake in July and a popular one for fishing the rest of the year; the state stocks and surveys it. There’s a public access site on the water, so you don’t need to own a piece of shoreline to use it.

What changed is the cottages. Over the decades the little seasonal cabins got insulated, expanded, and lived in all winter, until the resort village quietly became a regular suburb with a lake in the middle of it. Drive the shore roads now and you can still pick out the bones of the old summer place — small footprints, close to the water, set at funny angles — under the year-round houses they turned into.