Warren Woods State Park

Warren Woods State Park in Berrien County protects something increasingly rare in the Midwest: a stand of old-growth beech and sugar maple forest that was never logged. Edward Kirk Warren, a Three Oaks industrialist who made his fortune manufacturing featherbone as a corset stay substitute, began buying this woodland in eighteen seventy-nine, eventually holding about one hundred fifty acres of it, and kept it as a sanctuary. He stipulated that it must never be cut.

Michigan accepted the gift in the nineteen thirties. The trees here are massive, some over two hundred years old, with canopies that close out the sky. A designated National Natural Landmark, Warren Woods is one of the best remaining examples of the climax beech-maple forest that once covered much of southern Michigan and Indiana.

The Galien River flows through the park, and the understory feels genuinely primeval, a window into what the Great Lakes forest looked like before the lumber era.