D.H. Day’s kingdom
By Linda Hepler Beaty
Sun contributor
The area in Northern Michigan which is now the Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore was first inhabited by Native Americans, who lived in small settlements around rivers and lakes. But the village known today as Glen Haven was not a major site of Indian settlement. It didn’t even attract much attention from European settlers until 1857, nearly a decade after the Leelanau mainland had begun to be inhabited. By that time, the opening of the Erie Canal had greatly increased steamship traffic on the Great Lakes, with vessels carrying freight and passengers from Buffalo to Chicago. The need for wooding stations to fuel the ships that passed through the shipping lane reached an all time high, and in 1857, C.C. McCarty, the brother-in-law of Glen Arbor pioneer John E. Fisher, recognized the potential of the Sleeping Bear Bay area to become a major refueling station and a thriving settlement.
McCarty built a sawmill near the beach and an inn he called the “Sleeping Bear House,” (later renamed the Sleeping Bear Inn) to be used as a boarding house for the lumberjacks and dockworkers — and the occasional passenger who wanted to stay overnight. He named his prospective settlement “Sleeping Bearville.”
But McCarty’s vision wasn’t realized, at least not by him. The settlement, renamed “Glen Haven,” failed to attract the number of settlers he had anticipated. And those who were there soon left to fight in the Civil War. Further complicating matters was a fire in 1871, which consumed more than 2,000 cords of wood and most of the buildings that had been erected in the village. The buildings were replaced, but McCarty ended up selling his Glen Haven properties to the Northern Transit Company (NTC), a steamship line that originated in Cleveland.
The end of the war brought new settlers, among them P.P. Smith, a Union soldier who had secured employment with the NTC. Smith became the NTC foreman at the Glen Haven cordwood station for 13 years, and also served as postmaster at Glen Haven in 1880.
By 1878, Glen Haven’s importance to the NTC had grown by leaps and bounds, with 24 company vessels traveling from the New York offices to Chicago and Milwaukee. The company president, Philo Chamberlain, decided to appoint an agent to the Glen Haven station to replace Smith, and he selected his sister-in-law’s brother, David Henry Day.
D. H. Day, called “Henry” by his family, was a colorful figure. Raised by his gentle mother and community-minded and athletic father, he fell into a “wild” group of friends upon his father’s death of Bright’s disease. To separate him from these bad influences, his family sent him to Wisconsin, where he worked for the railroad, then the American Express Company, and finally to Detroit as a passenger agent for the NTC.
When Day arrived in Glen Haven, he was only 27 years old. He fell in love with the little town and its potential — and he fell in love with Eva Farrant, the beautiful daughter of the proprietor of the inn, where he was living. He spent the next 10 years working hard for NTC, but also planning to someday own the village and run it himself. By 1881, when NTC’s president Chamberlain died, and wood was no longer the primary fuel source for steamships (as coal burned hotter and longer), ships no longer stopped at Glen Haven’s station to fuel, and NTC’s directors decided to sell some of the company’s assets. Day seized his opportunity, taking all of his savings, plus loans that he had obtained from family and friends, including Perry Hannah of Hannah and Lay in Traverse City — to purchase NTC’s properties in Glen Haven under the name of D.H. Day and Company. This included the two NTC steamers Lawrence and Champlain, which he used for a new passenger line with regular service from Chicago and Cheboygan that he called the Northern Michigan Line.
Day then grew Glen Haven into both a profitable wooding town, with a sawmill for processing hardwood to ship to Chicago for the building industry, and a popular tourist town. He married his Eva and they lived in an apartment above the general store, which he had updated and expanded. The store became the center of town life, with the telegraph and post office located there, as well as a butcher shop, a granary, a root cellar and an icehouse nearby. Day also built a 50-foot ice-skating and curling rink in the village and a private tennis court reserved for family and friends. Little advertising was needed for the merchandising business, as his employees were given coupons called “scrip” in lieu of money, which were redeemable at the store.
By the early 1900s, when many other Leelanau wooding operations had closed, Day’s enterprise was still humming, thanks to the 5,000 forested acres he now owned in the area surrounding Glen Haven. He also diversified Glen Haven’s businesses by starting a farming operation 3 miles south of Glen Haven on M-109, where he kept 200 Holstein cows and 400 hogs, as well as more than 5,000 cherry and apple trees. By 1923, as the forest was depleted and the sawmill went quiet, Day erected the “Glen Haven Canning Company” on the village beach, purchasing fruit crops from orchard owners in the area at fair market price, then canning and shipping the product to large cities. He also began to build Glen Haven/Glen Arbor’s tourism industry with the development of “Day Forest Estates,” an exclusive summer resort which, when finished, was to include an 18-hole golf course, an airstrip and a clubhouse, and an annex built onto the Sleeping Bear Inn in anticipation of increased traffic into Glen Haven. By that time, Day, because of his efforts to keep the village thriving, was referred to as “the king of Glen Haven.”
D.H. Day died in 1928, and Glen Haven began to change, with businesses and property being divided among his children and outside investors. The Day Forest Estates plan was scrapped in the 1930s due to the Great Depression, although the golf course stayed open for a few years. The cannery closed in the 1940s as roads improved and trucking of goods outstripped lake travel. The Glen Haven School, which taught children in grades one through eight, closed in the 1950s and was moved to Glen Arbor next to the high school. And the blacksmith shop had been closed since the early 1920s.
Beginning in 1935, Day’s son-in-law, Louis Warnes, who continued to operate the general store, began a “dune buggy ride” business that operated from the store in Glen Haven, using Model A roadsters equipped with balloon sized tires to take passengers on joy rides over the sand of the Sleeping Bear Dunes for 25 cents each.
In 1970, Congress created the Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore, which included Glen Haven and the nearby sand dunes, and by the mid-1970s, the National Park Service had purchased the entire village. The Sleeping Bear Inn closed after the summer of 1972 and the General Store closed in 1978 when it was determined that the dune wagon traffic was potentially harmful to the natural environment of the sand dunes, and the rides were terminated.
Today, the Glen Haven Village Historic District, which is on the National Register of Historic Places, has been restored to represent its condition in the 1920s, and is considered the best remaining example of a Great Lakes logging village during that time. The National Park Service has opened some of the buildings, so even though Glen Haven is a ghost town, it still bustles with people — those visitors eager to learn about its history.
To learn more about Glen Haven’s history, read Glen Haven Village, a publication of Friends of Sleeping Bear Dunes, D. H. Day’s Kingdom, A Special History Study of Glen Haven Village Historical District, by Ron Cokrell and Sleeping Bear – Yesterday and Today, by George Weeks.
