The usual comment when meeting Jack Baad, a Glen Lake resident for many years, is that he looks fit and in great health. This is always followed by disbelief when it is revealed that he just had his 90th birthday.
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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.