Now here's a tale where I'm not going to tell you who the villain was, because I genuinely don't think there was one — and it is the reason you can drive up to any of these beaches today without asking anybody's permission. Name's Boone Merrick.
In the late nineteen fifties a Michigan senator named Philip Hart came up to this shore and concluded that it was too good to be carved into private lots — that the dunes, the islands, the whole coast ought to belong to everybody, forever. So in nineteen sixty-one he put a bill in to make it a National Lakeshore.
And this country went to war with him.
Because here is what a park meant if you already lived here. It meant the federal government buying your farm — your grandfather's farm, the one on sand that three generations had barely made a living on — whether or not you cared to sell. It meant your cottage, your woodlot, your town's tax base. On an August night in nineteen sixty-one, the director of the National Park Service stood up in the Glen Lake High School gymnasium in front of somewhere between fifteen hundred and two thousand people and tried to explain it, through catcalls and jeering, and at one point said, 'I'm a bureaucrat and proud of it.' When it was over and they asked who opposed the park, all but about four people in that room stood up.
They fought it for nine years. A hearing in Frankfort in sixty-three drew fifteen hundred people and a petition with eighteen thousand names. The citizens' council that ran the fight put it exactly this way: a fight between small people and a big government.
The bill passed the Senate twice and died in the House twice. It finally went through in nineteen seventy, and the President signed it that October.
Now — the honest ending, because the legend has grown taller than the facts. Of roughly fourteen hundred parcels, all but about a hundred and forty were sold willingly. Around seven percent went to condemnation, and most of those were arguments about PRICE, not people dragged off their land. Investigations later found no fraud. Sixteen owners sued over what they'd been paid, and sixteen owners won, and the government paid out another two and a half million dollars.
But you can't settle a thing like that with a number. A historian who studied it wrote that a generation after the land was bought, a blanket of bitterness still lay over this area — and if you get talking to somebody at a bar in Empire whose family sold, you may still feel the edge of it.
So enjoy the beach. It's yours. Just know it cost some of your neighbors their grandfather's farm to give it to you, and that they never entirely stopped minding.