The Depot That Became a Museum
Near Petoskey, Michigan
The handsome building on the waterfront was not built as a museum. It began as a railroad depot. In the early eighteen nineties the Chicago and West Michigan Railway completed this station on the shore of Little Traverse Bay, one of two competing rail lines that turned Petoskey into a booming summer resort.
Passengers stepped off the train practically at the water's edge. When the passenger trains faded, the depot found a second life. In the early nineteen seventies the Little Traverse Regional Historical Society took over the old station and opened it as the Little Traverse History Museum.
Inside you will find the layered story of this place, with exhibits on the Odawa people, the pioneer and Victorian eras, and the lumber and resort industries. It also honors two of the town's most famous writers. One is the Civil War historian Bruce Catton, born in Petoskey.
The other is Ernest Hemingway, who spent his boyhood summers nearby. The museum keeps a collection devoted to Hemingway. It is a fitting home for local memory, a depot that once carried people in now holding onto their stories.
