From Railroad Town to Gaslight District
Near Petoskey, Michigan
The compact brick downtown around you owes its existence to a single date, the last day of December eighteen seventy-four, when the Grand Rapids and Indiana Railroad first reached Petoskey. Before the railroad this was a small settlement on Bear Creek. After it, everything changed.
Beginning in the summer of eighteen seventy-five, city dwellers from Chicago, Detroit, and beyond poured north to escape the heat, seeking what people then called fresh air. A second line, the Chicago and West Michigan Railway, arrived in the following years, and steamships crowded the bay. Petoskey became the center of resort traffic for northwestern Lower Michigan.
Hotels, shops, and grand cottages went up quickly, and the downtown filled with the sturdy brick storefronts you still see, most dating from the eighteen seventies through the nineteen thirties. The name Gaslight District is far newer than the buildings. In nineteen sixty-seven a local merchant named Bill Barney organized fellow shop owners into a Gaslight Association, and the marketing name stuck.
Today the district is listed on the National Register of Historic Places, with more than one hundred contributing structures. It is a remarkably intact portrait of a Gilded Age resort town.
