Bewabic State Park: The CCC's Handmade Wilderness

Fortune Lake sits quietly in Michigan's Iron County, and the park on its shore is a Depression-era time capsule of skilled government labor.

Bewabic Park was established in nineteen twenty-three and became a state park in nineteen sixty-six, but it was the Civilian Conservation Corps in the nineteen thirties that shaped what visitors see today. Young men from the CCC, many of them from cities and with no outdoor skills when they arrived, built the bathhouse, the picnic shelters, the roads, and the trails that still serve the park. The structures are so well made that they remain in daily use nearly ninety years later.

The park was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in twenty sixteen specifically for its CCC-related architecture, a recognition that the physical labor of those Depression-era workers is itself historically significant. The name Bewabic is an Ojibwe word meaning place of iron, which fits this corner of Iron County perfectly. The three-hundred-fifteen-acre park is a local treasure just off the highway, unchanged in most of the ways that matter.