Glen Haven General Store takes us back to ‘Roaring 20’s’

By Jacob Wheeler
Sun Editor
No, you can’t buy the pouches of Bugler roll-it-yourself tobacco. And no, the Coca Cola in the big red cooler behind you does not include cocaine as an ingredient. But nearly everything else at the refurnished General Store in Glen Haven is accurately reminiscent of the 1920s.

The store’s grand opening will take place on Saturday, May 31, at 10 a.m. though visitors may have a peek inside as early as Friday, May 23. The local branch of the National Park’s most recent turn-back-the-clock enterprise will be open to the public from 10-5, every day until Labor Day weekend.
“The idea is to make everything look like it did in the 20’s,” says NP spokesperson Bill Herd, who has been busy stocking shelves and getting the General Store ready for visitors. Kerosene lanterns line the back wall, reminiscent of a time when electricity was not a given. Frying pans are stacked across the aisle, to ensure that fish caught in Sleeping Bear Bay receive their proper burial. Visitors who want a memento to take home with them may purchase these items for $29.95 and $19.95, respectively. Books and postcards chronicling Glen Haven’s early days as a company owned town that supplied cordwood to fuel the steamships that passed by, as well as wooden toys, ship models and big jars full of rock candy will also be available.
“We’d like to carry a little bit of everything here, just as the General Store did,” says Herd. “Glen Haven was a company town owned by (local founding father) David Henry Day, so people were paid in credit. They could redeem that credit at the store, so you wanted a little bit of everything in stock to avoid sending people to far-off Glen Arbor or Empire.
Herd says the General Store was built sometime in the 1860s. D.H. Day acquired it in the mid-1880s along with the rest of Glen Haven and 5,000 acres of adjacent timberland that included Alligator Hill and stretched all the way to the shores of Little Glen Lake.
The National Park has made every effort to highlight Glen Haven’s link to the shipping industry, which was booming at the time. In the back of the General Store is a genuine ticket window where locals could secure passage on one of the steamers cruising by for Chicago or the other Great Lakes. The ticket window was also a Western Union office.