Epworth Heights, a Methodist Summer City
Near Ludington, Michigan
Just north of Ludington, on a bluff above Lake Michigan, sits a cluster of old wooden cottages that make up one of the oldest summer colonies on the shore. This is Epworth Heights, and it was born out of the end of the lumber era. As the sawmills fell silent in the eighteen nineties, Ludington's leaders formed a citizens development company and cast about for a new way to keep the town alive.
Together with the Flint and Pere Marquette Railroad, they set their sights on tourism, hoping to fill the empty dune land north of town with vacationers. In eighteen ninety four they persuaded a group of West Michigan Methodists connected to the Epworth League to establish a summer assembly there. The founders wrote a mission of grounds set aside for summer homes, for camp meetings, and for gatherings devoted to learning, culture, religion, and morality.
That first year they built a hotel, an auditorium, and classrooms, and the first cottages followed the next year, and by eighteen ninety nine there were thirty eight cottages on the grounds. Still operated as a private resort association under a Michigan law dating to eighteen eighty nine, Epworth Heights remains a rare living survivor of the age when the railroads sold Michigan's shore as a destination.
