The Old Coast Guard Station

Near the beach at Sterns Park stands a handsome white building with a tall lookout tower, and it has been watching this harbor for the better part of a century. It was built in nineteen thirty four as a United States Coast Guard station, the base from which crews launched into howling Lake Michigan storms to save mariners in trouble. For decades this was a place of sudden alarms and dangerous rescues, guarding the same busy harbor mouth the car ferries steamed through day and night.

When the Coast Guard finally moved on, the station could have been lost. Instead it was restored and reopened to the public as the Port of Ludington Maritime Museum. The old crew's quarters, boat bay, and lookout tower were preserved, and three floors of exhibits now tell the region's whole seafaring story, from lighthouses and shipwrecks to the lumber trade and the legendary car ferry fleet.

You can learn about the Pere Marquette ships and the Badger, and the original Fresnel lens that once shone from the breakwater light. The building that spent its working life saving sailors now keeps their memory, a fitting second career for a station that has seen every kind of Great Lakes weather.