Glen Haven is where history and play comes to life at Sleeping Bear Dunes.
Glen Haven now appears sleepy, but was once a busy cord-wood station that was able to adapt to a changing landscape by diversifying into farming, canning, and tourism industries. Today, the history of Glen Haven is still preserved within several buildings that you can visit during your trip to Sleeping Bear Dunes.
Take the opportunity to visit several buildings that are open to the public to explore and see how Surfmen from the United States Life Saving Service would have lived and worked, what it takes to make a nail at the Blacksmith, or experience a General Store.
From Memorial Day to Labor Day these buildings are open and staffed.
The dock played a central role in the life of Glen Haven. Built around 1865, the dock stretched a hundred feet offshore and supplied docked steamships with cordwood, the original steamship fuel, cut from Northern Michigan forests. Around the turn of the 20th century, up to 70 vessels could be found anchored in Sleeping Bear Bay or at the docks during the shipping season. Original dock pilings can often be spied peeking out above Lake Michigan's waves.
By the 1900s D.H. Day owned Glen Haven, 5,000 acres around it, 5,000 cherry and apple trees, a farm with hundreds of hogs, and a massive lumber company. Day was a visionary. He could see that the demand for lumber was falling rapidly, and he would need to diversify. So he started a canning company. The Glen Haven Canning Company processed cherries, raspberries, and peaches and shipped the finished canned goods to Great Lake cities.
The National Lakeshore's Maritime Museum is housed in the Sleeping Bear Point U.S. Life-Saving Service Station. Walk through the boathouse next to the museum and see the life-saving equipment used during the early 1900's.
Built around 1867, the Blacksmith Shop was an indispensable component of the maritime village. Not only did the shop forge metal works, but it also served as the town's carpentry center. Nearly everyone in town had some need for the blacksmith's services, which included crafting and repairing oxen yolks, tools, and carriages, shoeing horses, and constructing pre-built homes, dining halls, and horse barns.
Originally known as the Sleeping Bear House, this inn with bright geraniums filling its window boxes welcomed the guests of the little village for nearly one hundred years. D.H. Day himself married the daughter of the innkeeper and lived in the second story for a while. In addition to Day and his family, the inn hosted an eclectic mix of lumberjacks, dock workers, businessmen and posh passengers.
Six years after Day's death, his daughter Marion and her husband Louis Warnes began running Dunesmobile rides out of Glen Haven. It started with a 1934 Ford which took four people out to the crest of the dunes and back. It was a thrilling 35-minute ride that took passengers to the crest of the dunes and back for 25 cents each. By the time the rides ended in 1978, there were 13 dunes wagons each carrying 14 passengers on a 12 mile, 35-minute excursion.
Glen Haven has a variety of activities in this little corner of the Lakeshore. Amongst the Historic Village you can spend time on the beach, hike the namesake of the park - Sleeping Bear, or hop on to the fully accessible Sleeping Bear Heritage Trail.
If you can only do one hike in Sleeping Bear Dunes, this is the one! Sleeping Bear Point offers a little bit of everything: woods, dunes, water; shaded and more exposed areas; and beauty, beauty, beauty.
Thanks to the efforts of a National Park Service partnership with nonprofit organizations, local, and state agencies, Lakeshore visitors can now safely stroll, bike, and in winter months ski portions of the Sleeping Bear Dunes Heritage Trail. A 27-mile route linking the neighboring communities of Glen Arbor and Empire, Michigan, to visitor destinations within the National Lakeshore.
Glen Haven Beach is a pebbly beach on the edge of Sleeping Bear Bay. This popular beach offers a little bit of everything. Not only the perfect destination for a family getaway, some fun in the sun with friends, or a day to yourself, it is also a fantastic spot to take a break-from biking along the Sleeping Bear Heritage Trail.
**Leashed pets are welcome to the right of the Maritime Museum, when facing the water, to all the way past the Cannery and D. H. Day Campground.**
Historic Glen Haven sits within Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore, a testament to the resolve and ingenuity of the early settlers of the Great Lakes region.
