Midwest Guest

Phillip A. Hart Visitor Center at Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore

Michigan's Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore is one of my favorite destinations.

We've visited the park many times, in several different seasons, and we make it a point to try stopping first at the park's Phillip A. Hart Visitor Center every time we're in the area.

Phillip A. Hart was a Democratic U.S. Senator representing Michigan from 1959 to 1976. Hart, a strong proponent of issues like civil rights and environmental protection, earned the honor of having the park headquarters bear his name because he was the driving force behind getting legislation passed to protect the park for future Michigan residents and visitors.

The Sleeping Bear Dunes owe their name, if you can believe a popular Native American legend, to the sad story two bear cubs that died trying to escape a forest fire. The cubs and their mother attempted swimming to safety as a forest fire drove them from their northern Wisconsin home. The mother made it across Lake Michigan, while the cubs tired and drowned just short of safety on shore in northwestern Michigan. Today, a large sand dune represents the mother who climbed atop a bluff in Michigan hoping to see her cubs make it to shore, while two islands represent the cubs where they drowned just short of shore.

Visitors can learn about the Sleeping Bear legend, ongoing efforts to protect the area, and check out a several exhibits about the geology, ecology, and history of the park at the visitor center.

The center also has other resources to help visitors make the most of their time at the park, which covers 71,000 acres and includes 35 miles of Lake Michigan shoreline, the big dune, scenic drives, 58 miles of marked hiking trails, camp grounds, North and South Manitou islands, and areas open to hunters and boaters.

You can find a lot of information about the area, its attractions, and seasonal events with the Sleeping Bear Dunes online visitor guide, but visiting the center is even better because you can pick up detailed hiking trail maps, pick up park brochures and booklets, and talk to park rangers to ask specific questions. The visitor center is also one of the best places to purchase your park pass (the $10 for a week-long pass or $20 for an annual pass goes toward park maintenance and improvement) or hit the restrooms before getting out to enjoy the park.

One of my favorite features of the center is the gift store. I've purchased books, caps, T-shirts, scrapbook stickers, and other gifts at the visitor center over the years. You might be able to find a few of the items elsewhere, but I like buying them at the visitor center because that money also goes to support the park.

The Phillip A. Hart Visitor center is about 22 miles east of Traverse City in the village of Empire and is open every day but Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Years Day.

 

Want to read more about the Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore? Check out these stories at Midwest Guest:

Port Oneida Rural Historic District celebrates northern Michigan's agricultural heritage

Conquering the Sleeping Bear Dune Climb

Seven sensational Great Lakes National Parks

You might also enjoy one of these books about the park and its history:

The Legend of Sleeping Bear

Sixties Sandstorm: The Fight over Establishment of a Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore, 1961-1970

Soaring and Gliding: The Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore Area (Images of Aviation)

© Dominique King 2010 All rights reserved

Midwest Guest is featured travel blog at Raveable.com this month

I was excited to see a tweet from @raveable yesterday on Twitter congratulating me for being the featured travel blogger on Raveable.com this week.

Raveable.com is a site featuring hotel reviews that links to a variety of travel blogs to complement and supplement their hotel information with personal accounts of attractions and information near rated hotels.

Each week, Raveable.com staff selects one of its featured travel bloggers to place on its homepage spotlight. This week, it is my turn in the spotlight!

You can check out my Raveable.com blogger page here. Be sure to check out the other featured Raveable travel bloggers, too.

© Dominique King 2010 All rights reserved

Light keeping at the Old Mission Point Lighthouse

I love making the 17-mile scenic drive up M-37 along the Old Mission Peninsula through the cherry orchards and vineyards and away from busy Traverse City, Michigan, to see the lighthouse picturesquely perched at the peninsula’s tip as it juts out into Grand Traverse Bay.

The Old Mission Point Lighthouse’s somewhat remote location is even more notable for the fact that it sits almost exactly on the 45th parallel, halfway between the earth’s equator and the North Pole.

Signs at the site denoting the light’s latitudinal location are one of a handful of locations in Michigan similarly marked and are a good place to stage one of those quintessentially cheesy tourist shots for your vacation photo album.

The Old Mission Point Lighthouse is also notable because it is a twin to the long-gone Mama Juda Lighthouse that guided mariners through a portion of the Detroit River at the north end of Grosse Ile and near the Canadian shoreline near the city of Detroit. The Mama Juda light sat on a 30-acre island, with both the island and the lighthouse named for an American Indian woman who set up a fishing camp in the area each season. The Mama Juda lighthouse, built in 1849 and rebuilt in 1866, disappeared by the mid-1900s. High water washed away the lighthouse in 1950, and water washed away the entire island by 1960.

Treacherous travel and wrecks caused by shallow waters and sandy shoals projecting a couple of miles out from the Old Missions Peninsula’s northern tip led Congress to appropriate $6,000 to build a lighthouse at the point in 1859, but the project wasn’t completed until 1870 because of delays caused by expenditures for the Civil War.

The little wooden lighthouse has a square tower atop the 1 ½-story keeper dwelling. The tower is only 30 feet tall, but the lighthouse location on top of a sand bank fourteen feet above the Lake Michigan surface gave the lens a focal plane height of 47 feet, allowing mariners to see the light from 13 miles out at sea.

The original lamp fueled by whale oil, then kerosene, featured a Fifth Order Fresnel lens. Today, however, the lighthouse lantern room stands empty, and an electric beacon a couple of miles offshore now guides traffic around the shallows and into the West Arm of Grand Traverse Bay.

Old Mission Point Lighthouse remained in active service until 1933.

The State of Michigan assumed ownership of the lighthouse by the 1940s and established the site as a new park after World War II. Peninsula Township assumed responsibility and ownership of the park and buildings that included the lighthouse, the Hesler log cabin, and several other outbuildings like storage sheds, a garage, and a brick pump house in 1948.

Park visitors could always view the lighthouse from the park and the nearby beach, but the lighthouse served as a private home to the park manager until park officials finally opened the lighthouse and tower to the public for the first time in May of 2008.

Public visiting hours for the Old Mission Point Lighthouse run from May through October, when visitors can view an on-site museum, check out displays that provide a look at turn-of-the-twentieth-century lighthouse life, and climb up into the empty tower to check out the view over Lake Michigan.

Visitors with the time and desire to more fully immerse themselves into the Old Mission Lighthouse experience can apply to be a volunteer light keeper through a new program that duplicates a similar popular program at the nearby Grand Traverse Lighthouse. Volunteer keepers pay $800 to live at Old Mission Point Lighthouse for a month and perform duties like greeting visitors, giving guided tours of the lighthouse and tower, and performing general cleaning and maintenance tasks. Money generated by the volunteer light keeper program and day admission fees help fund lighthouse expenses and go towards the goal of making the park and lighthouse self-supporting.

© Dominique King 2010 All rights reserved

Photo Friday: Cherry Bowl Drive-in

The Cherry Bowl Drive-In at Honor in northern Michigan represents a real blast from the past. The drive-in, now celebrating 56 years in operation, hosts family-friendly films in a 1950s-style atmosphere.

I have fond memories of going to our local drive-in theater as a kid. I loved playing in the theater’s playground near the big screen and heading up to the concession stand for hot dogs and popcorn, often after the corny slides advertising the theater’s eats appeared on the screen between flicks.

Today, there are only a handful of drive-in theaters in many Midwest states.

Some present-day drive-in theaters represent off-season uses for venues like the Compuware Arena in Plymouth, Michigan, (where we watch the Plymouth Whalers of the Ontario Hockey League play). Compuware uses their large parking lot as a drive-in with temporary screens during months when the lot isn’t used for hockey game parking.

The Cherry Bowl, opened in 1953, is one of fewer than a dozen dedicated drive-in theaters in Michigan. The theater’s Web site assures families that all movies it plays are no stronger than a PG-13 rating, do not glorify teen drinking or drug use, and that it offers a program each night of operation that includes a double feature with vintage intermission films and cartoons. And yes, there is a playground and a 1950s-style mini golf course to amuse the kids before the movies start.

The Cherry Bowl lies dormant for the winter right now, but come May, the theater opens for yet another nostalgic-rich season at the movies.

Thanks to Debbie Dubrow of Delicious Baby for creating and coordinating Photo Friday to link travel photos and blog posts across the Web.

© Dominique King 2010 All rights reserved

Things To Do
Honor

Early northern Michigan pioneer history comes alive at Hesler home

We love visiting lighthouses and learning about their history, but visiting the little log Hesler home adjacent to the Old Mission Point Lighthouse north of Traverse City, Michigan, offers a unique opportunity to learn about the earliest pioneers in the region.

Joseph and Mary Hesler settled along the eastern shore of the Old Mission Peninsula in the mid-1850s, clearing the land of dense forest and building a simple log cabin with the timber they harvested.

The snug little cabin featured outside walls joined with modified dove-tailed joints and served as shelter for the couple until they sold it in 1866.

Joseph, a Canadian, and Mary, born in Ireland, were typical of the Irish, English, Canadian, and Scottish immigrants living and farming in the Old Mission Peninsula region by the 1860s. Their cabin was also typical of the sort of homes built in the region during that era.

I was unable to discover what happened to the Heslers after they moved from their little log home, but the cabin served as a private home, shelter for migrant workers coming to the area to pick fruit like northern Michigan’s famous cherry crops, as a school, and, intriguingly enough, as a shelter for a bull!

By the early 1990s, the little cabin was empty and slated for demolition until area residents spent several years rallying to save, restore, and move the home to a site 14 miles to the north and next to the Old Mission Point Lighthouse.

In 2001, the State of Michigan erected an historical marker telling the story of the home, which is a rare surviving example of the log homes from the early settlement of Old Mission Peninsula. Visitors can peek in the cabin’s windows or, in the warmer tourist season, look through a glass partition and listen to a recorded history of the cabin, to see how northern Michigan’s earliest pioneers lived.

The wooded area next to the lighthouse is the perfect site for the Hesler home, giving visitors a real sense of how the home might have looked tucked into the northern Michigan forest.

Families and avid geocachers might also enjoy searching for a couple easy caches at the park (one physical cache box and one virtual cache), both of which are still active as I write this story.

 

Be sure to come back to Midwest Guest later this month to learn more about the Old Mission Point Lighthouse.

 

Check out the book Traveling Through Time: A Guide to Michigan’s Historical Markers for the complete text of the Hesler home marker and to find other interesting sites marked by the State of Michigan in Grand Traverse County and the surrounding area.

© Dominique King 2010 All rights reserved

Things To Do
Traverse City

Midwest travel links for February 2010

Here are a few Midwest stories I’ve enjoyed reading this past month:

• Those of you observing Lent may still be savoring the idea of that last taste of sweets until Easter. Join Becks Davis of Detroit Moxie as she travels to Hamtramck, Michigan, for the traditional Polish Paczki on Fat Tuesday.

• Sarah went Wandering Off and found this cool art installation on the University of Kansas campus. What do you think? Bewitching, bewildering, or bedazzling?





• I love visiting those funky and largely unknown museums that are unique to a particular city or destination. Check out this great list of unusual and unexpected museums in Cleveland, Ohio, at What Locals Like About Cleveland Plus—a list that includes Lake View Cemetery, which Midwest Guest readers may remember reading about here.

• Amy of A Closer Look at Flyover Land invites readers to join her for a perfectly civilized afternoon in St. Paul, Minnesota with an up-close look at the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra.

• Aimée takes readers of the Indiana Insider Blog on a tour of Bloomington, Indiana. Check out Indiana University, do a little shopping, and have a great meal to round out your day in Bloomington.

• Kath takes Great Lakes Gazette readers on a tour of Marquette, Michigan. See what makes this Upper Peninsula city a Distinctive Destination, according to the National Trust for Historic Preservation. Northern Michigan University, Lake Superior shoreline, cool architecture—no wonder Marquette came in first among online voters among the Dozen Distinctive Destinations for 2010.

• Check out these ornate Lombard Lamps in Chicago, Illinois, on the Chicago Architecture Blog. The massive lamps are familiar to residents of Hamburg, Germany, where similar lamps have lined the famous Lombard Bridge in that city since 1869.

• Regular readers of Midwest Guest know that I have a special interest in unique bridges, so I have to include this story by Linda at Travels with Children about North Dakota’s Fairview Lift Bridge.





• Christopher of the Cleveland Area History blog began compiling a list of what he judges as the 100 most important Cleveland, Ohio, Landmarks and asks readers to help complete the list. There are some great places on this list, including Lake View Cemetery’s Wade Chapel (thanks for linking to my story about the chapel, Christopher). I can’t wait to get back to Cleveland to explore some of the places on this list.

© Dominique King 2010 All rights reserved

Photo Friday: Rosa Parks bus at The Henry Ford

Little did Rosa Parks know that when she boarded city bus 2857 in Montgomery, Alabama, one December day in 1955 that it was the beginning of a ride that would change history, help strike down restrictive segregation laws in the South, and advance the cause of civil rights in the United States.

The original bus, found rotting away in an Alabama field, now sits proudly restored at The Henry Ford in Dearborn, Michigan.

Check out yesterday’s story here at Midwest Guest to learn more about Rosa Parks and this historic bus.

Thanks to Debbie Dubrow of Delicious Baby for creating and coordinating Photo Friday to link travel photos and blog posts across the Web.

© Dominique King 2010 All rights reserved

See the bus Rosa Parks rode into history at The Henry Ford in Dearborn, Michigan

Rosa Parks, the “mother of the civil rights movement”, moved to Detroit, Michigan, in 1957, so it only seems fitting that the Montgomery, Alabama, bus she rode into history after refusing to relinquish her seat to a white man in December of 1955 followed her to Michigan.

We’re fortunate to be able to view the historic vehicle at The Henry Ford in Dearborn, Michigan, which lovingly restored the bus after three decades of neglect when it sat rusting away in an Alabama field. The story of Rosa Parks, her move to Detroit, and her influence on the civil rights movement throughout the years is interesting enough-the story of what happened to the bus at the center of her story is intriguing as well.

Other African American women violated Montgomery city ordinances dictating strictly segregated city buses before Parks’ historic refusal to move, but Montgomery civil rights leaders picked Parks, a hard-working seamstress with an impeccable reputation, as the face of the case to challenge the Montgomery law.

Montgomery civil rights leaders called for a bus boycott. The question ended up in the U.S. Supreme Court, which ruled Montgomery’s segregation law unconstitutional, and the 381-day bus boycott ended in December 1956.

Parks earned many awards and honors, including receiving a Presidential Medal of Freedom from President Bill Clinton in 1996.

Meanwhile, a man named Roy H. Summerford purchased the old 36-seat bus Montgomery city bus and parked it in a field where it ended up as a derelict hulk used to store lumber and tools. Summerford died in 1986, and his daughter inherited the bus.

The bus had a brief bit of fame in 1990 when it was one of three buses used in a movie called The Long Walk Home. The bus, already inoperable by this time, rolled through the scenes with the aid of a cable pulling it along.

Summerford heirs finally decided to sell the bus in 2000 by initially listing it for sale on eBay. The listing drew media attention, but a lack of documentation about the authenticity of the vehicle probably made some potential bidders hesitant to meet or beat the $100,000 minimum asking price.

Officials at the MastroNet auction house began researching the bus and its background, eventually authenticating it largely using a collection of press clippings from the mid-1950s assembled by a professional clipping service.

The bus went up for auction in 2001 and drew at least 45 bids, including from the city of Denver, the Smithsonian, and The Henry Ford. The Michigan museum won the bus with a bid of $427,919 and spent nearly $500,000 total to pick up the bus, the clipping collection, and a 1955 Montgomery bus driver uniform, coin changer, and punch.

The bus was in pretty rugged shape with a missing engine, missing seats, and broken windows. The vehicle was rusty and the original “fruit salad” paint scheme of white, yellow, and green faded beyond recognition.

The Henry Ford spent $300,000-plus to restore the bus, with help from the Federal government in the form of a $205,000 grant through the Save America’s Treasures program.

I remember viewing the bus shortly after The Henry Ford acquired it, when they briefly put it on display before beginning the long and expensive restoration. This National Bus Trader magazine article from 2002 has some great photos of that initial showing of the bus at The Henry Ford and a ceremony honoring Rosa Parks as she viewed the vehicle.

Rosa Parks died in 2005, and you can visit her burial place at Detroit’s Woodlawn Cemetery.

Meanwhile, Mrs. Parks’ influence lives on and today, visitors can board the restored bus and sit in the place she refused to vacate back in 1955.

Check out my story about a unique Michael Jackson tribute near Rosa Parks’ burial place in Woodlawn Cemetery.

Readers interested in learning more about Rosa Parks might enjoy Rosa Parks: A Life by Douglas Brinkley or Rosa Parks: My Story by Rosa Parks and Jim Haskins.

Interested in learning more about the bus boycott or the early civil rights movement in general? You might enjoy Montgomery Bus Boycott and the Women Who Started It: The Memoir of Jo Ann Gibson Robinson or Parting the Waters: America in the King Years 1954-1963 by Taylor Branch III.

© Dominique King 2010 All rights reserved

Things To Do
Dearborn

President Garfield’s Lawnfield home drew the nation to Mentor, Ohio

Today President James A. Garfield’s Lawnfield home exudes an air of quiet elegance, but the home and its spacious grounds drew the nation’s attention to Mentor, Ohio, when Garfield literally conducted his campaign from his own Ohio front porch in 1880.

The hugely popular Civil War hero, educator, and legislator originally envisioned the home in Mentor as a place where he could farm, conduct agricultural experiments, and teach his children to farm. Life had other plans for Garfield, though, who emerged as a compromise candidate during a seemingly deadlocked Republican convention in 1880.

We enjoyed taking a docent-led tour of the home and grounds at Lawnfield. Our guide explained the history of the house, told us how Garfield ran his successful campaign for president from the house’s front porch and a small outbuilding behind the house, and told us about his widow Lucretia’s dedication to preserving her husband’s legacy through meticulous care of his papers and other artifacts.

Built in 1832 as a 1 ½ story house by James Dickey, the Garfields expanded the home after purchasing it in 1876. By 1880, the Garfields added 11 rooms to the 9-room home, making a much larger 2 ½-story home to more readily accommodate the couple and their five children.

Another notable improvement made by the Garfields was the addition of a large porch across the front of the house. A train stop at the rear of the Garfield property brought thousands of admirers directly to the presidential candidate. Visitors disembarked the train and walked down a short lane to see Garfield make campaign speeches from this porch- giving rise to the idea of a homey, “front porch campaign”.

Garfield campaign office

Other buildings on the property include a small building behind the house that served as headquarters and telegraph office for the campaign, a carriage house (that now serves as a visitor center), an impressive 75-foot-tall windmill/pumphouse, and other barns and outbuildings.

The press corps of the day encamped on the lawn of the home through that 1880 campaign, dubbing the place Lawnfield.

Garfield went on to win the presidency and left for Washington, never returning to his beloved Lawnfield before his assassination.

After Garfield’s death, Lucretia Garfield stayed on at Lawnfield. She added a memorial library wing and vault to the house, carefully preserving her husband’s papers, artifacts, and historical legacy. Seeing Mrs. Garfield’s meticulous record-keeping and preservation was one of the more fascinating parts of our tour of Lawnfield, and it was interesting to learn that her efforts resulted in establishing one of the first real presidential libraries.

Garfield heirs sold Lawnfield to the Western Reserve Historical Society in 1936. The Society restored the home and opened it to the public.

Lawnfield earned designation as a National Historic site in 1980, and a multi-million-dollar restoration in the late 1990s recreated the home much as it was in the late 1800s. About 80 percent of the period furnishings in the home today originally belonged to the Garfield family.

Visitors cannot take photos inside of the home, but you can get a peek at Lawnfield’s interior at the Western Reserve Historical Society site.

Check out Cleveland monument is lasting tribute to President James A. Garfield for more about this president’s life, and his final resting place.

Readers interested in learning more may enjoy reading the Garfield biography, Dark Horse: The Surprise Election and Political Murder of President James A. Garfield.

I also recently discovered the availability of an intriguing looking reprint of an original book written by Horatio Alger in 1881 called From Canal Boy to President: Or the Boyhood and Manhood of James A Garfield.

© Dominique King 2010 All rights reserved

Things To Do
Mentor

Photo Friday: More photos from the Garfield Memorial

We spent quite a while in the Garfield Memorial when we visited the monument in Cleveland’s Lake View Cemetery. It’s especially interesting to consider that President James A. Garfield, the last president born in a log cabin and the product of a difficult and impoverished childhood, has such an architecturally elaborate memorial building.

Check out my story, Cleveland monument is lasting tribute to President James A. Garfield, for more about this president, his life, and the drive to honor his accomplishments with a proper monument after his untimely assassination in 1881.

Thanks to Debbie Dubrow of Delicious Baby for creating and coordinating Photo Friday to link travel photos and blog posts across the Web.

© Dominique King 2010 All rights reserved