Establishing the National Lakeshore — Nineteen Seventy and the Fight to Preserve It

Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore was not established without resistance. When the federal government began acquiring land in Benzie and Leelanau counties in the nineteen sixties for the proposed park, many residents and landowners opposed it. Families who had owned property along the lakeshore for generations did not want to sell to the government. Local officials worried about the loss of the tax base. Some community members argued that outside conservation priorities were being imposed on a local landscape.

The legislation authorizing the National Lakeshore passed in nineteen seventy, and the National Park Service began acquiring land within the park boundary. The acquisitions took decades and were sometimes contentious. Some property owners within the boundary were allowed to remain on their land for a time under retained-use agreements.

Today the park encompasses about seventy one thousand acres and receives roughly one and a half million visitors per year. In twenty eleven, Good Morning America named it the Most Beautiful Place in America. The communities of Glen Arbor, Empire, and Maple City sit adjacent to but outside the park boundary and have built small-scale tourism economies around the lakeshore traffic. The towns remain small. The dunes remain large. The conflict over who the landscape belongs to, which the park's establishment was supposed to settle, is not entirely forgotten by the families who lost land to it.