The Interurban and the Resort Era

The crowds that fill this lakeshore every summer are nothing new. Grand Haven became a resort town more than a century ago, and the thing that brought the tourists was electricity on rails. Earlier, a little local line nicknamed the Dummy Line was already hauling day-trippers from downtown out to Highland Park, a long-popular summer cottage colony, past Lighthouse Hill to a pavilion on the shore.

Then, in nineteen oh two, the big electric interurban opened, the Grand Rapids, Grand Haven and Muskegon Railway. The company had been granted its Michigan franchise that September. It connected Grand Rapids to the lakeshore, with a branch reaching down to Grand Haven and a spur running the last couple of miles out to the resort at Highland Park.

The branch to Grand Haven left the main line at Grand Haven Junction, near Fruitport. Cars drew power from a third rail between the cities and from overhead wires in the towns. Suddenly a family in Grand Rapids could ride an electric car straight to a Lake Michigan beach in an afternoon.

The cottages filled, the pavilions opened, and the resort boom was on. The interurban ran until nineteen twenty-eight, when the automobile finally replaced it, but the summer crowds it created never left. The line was officially abandoned on April eighteenth, nineteen twenty-eight, and Greyhound buses took over the passenger service.