Glen Haven — Cordwood Village and the Canning Era
Near Sleeping Bear Dunes, Michigan
A mile or so west of the main dune area sits Glen Haven, a small village that the National Park Service has preserved as a window into the working history of this shoreline. What looks today like a quiet cluster of historic buildings on the water was, for several decades in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, an active commercial operation serving two very different industries.
The first was cordwood. When paddle-wheel steamers moved through the Great Lakes in the eighteen fifties and sixties, they burned enormous quantities of wood to fuel their boilers. The forests along the Lake Michigan shore supplied that wood, cut to four-foot lengths and stacked on the beach for transfer to passing steamers. Glen Haven was founded in eighteen fifty seven when a man named C.C. McCarty built a sawmill and an inn on the beach to serve this traffic.
As steam ships converted to coal, David Henry Day, a local entrepreneur who owned thousands of acres of orchards on the surrounding land, shifted the village toward fruit. In the early twentieth century a cannery there processed cherries and other fruit from his farms. The cannery building still stands and today houses a collection of Great Lakes wooden boats. The general store that served the village is still standing as well, looking much as it did when steamer passengers stopped in for supplies.
