Well-traveled Copemish Depot finds new home near Glen Arbor
By F. Josephine Arrowood
Sun contributor
There’s a painted lady in Glen Arbor, setting heads a-swivel as they walk, bike, or drive past Bay Lane at M-22. Although diminutive at under 700 square feet, she has an outsized personality. She’s well-traveled for her age—at least 125 years—and her pedigree is just as colorful as her painted trim, ornate corbels, and drop finials. For more than five decades, she’s been hiding in plain sight in the former Wildflowers retail compound on S. Glen Lake Rd. In the spring of 2021, she began a new chapter as the private residence of a family with an abiding affection for the Glen Arbor area.
“She” wears a sign proclaiming herself the Copemish Depot. But Copemish, a sleepy village in northeastern Manistee County, is a solid 50 miles away, and no rail service requiring a passenger station was ever erected at Glen Arbor (a line was planned from Cedar City in the 1920s, but was diverted to Provemont—now Lake Leelanau—instead). What was the connection between Glen Arbor village and the charming little depot?
Her story began when railroads were king and the lumber boom made fortunes in much of northern Michigan. In 1889, two rail companies—one, the Frankfort & SE (which would become part of the Ann Arbor Railroad), and the other, the Chicago & Western Michigan (later the Pere Marquette)—created a railroad intersection called a Diamond Crossing in southern Benzie County. This mechanical innovation would efficiently connect people and goods from northern Michigan, the Upper Peninsula, and Wisconsin with Grand Rapids, Chicago, Ann Arbor, Detroit, and Ohio.
The hub quickly became a settlement known as Thompsonville; by 1900, it was the “biggest little town in Michigan.” Its two depots, situated across from each other on the Diamond, oversaw not only materials and products, but also tourists who flocked to resorts at Frankfort, Crystal Lake, Traverse City, Solon, Provemont, and beyond. The pretty painted lady, owned by the Ann Arbor Railroad, sat east of the tracks, adjacent to the so-called “switch tower,” a ground-interlocking machine in a shed that facilitated the movement of trains from one rail line to another.
Other towns along these rail routes thrived during the lumber era, too, including Copemish, situated about four miles southeast of Thompsonville just over the Manistee County line. But in 1917, Copemish’s original depot, also built around 1891, burned. The painted lady thus made the journey—appropriately by rail—from Thompsonville to her second home at Copemish’s own Diamond Crossing (one railroad ran to Manistee), where she continued to greet passengers for the next 48 years.
As the lumber era came to a close, and autos became more numerous and affordable after WWII, train service diminished—as did many small towns along their route. By the early 1960s, the Ann Arbor Railroad maintained a freight operation through Copemish, but no longer offered passenger train service.
In August 1965 the decommissioned depot made the 50-mile trip on a flatbed trailer to the village of Glen Arbor. The painted lady—a bit tattered, but still recognizable in her simplified ball-and-dowel spandrel brackets, projecting gabled ticket bay, and tall, two-over-two windows—was the ultimate antiquing find for Virginia Hinton and Charlene Baker, owners of The Country Store. Virginia Hinton taught at the Leelanau School, was a certified gemologist, and an early mentor of jewelry designer Becky Thatcher. According to a newspaper article of the time, The Country Store was a gift shop “designed in the manner of an old-fashioned store, …furnished with original antiques, including a potbellied stove, cracker barrel, coffee mill, and an old cash register.” Despite the lack of railroad tracks, the painted lady from Copemish would fit right in, welcoming the many visitors who would exclaim over her well-formed timbers, beadboard paneling, and colorful embellishments.
In 1980, Donna Burgan bought the complex and created Wildflowers: a gift shop, garden center, and design studio that flourished for 40 years, a tranquil oasis adjoining the village’s increasingly bustling tourism. As Wildflowers grew, so too did the visual clutter surrounding the painted lady, obscuring her Carpenter Gothic-inspired details behind the main store building, extensive gardens, landscaping inventory, and Christmas decor. At some point, whether as part of The Country Store or Wildflowers, extra doors were cut into her original side façades, and additional alterations were created—perhaps necessary to a retail business, but not in keeping with the lady’s historical harmonious appearance.
Burgan decided to retire in 2019, and eventually the property was sold to a developer with plans to build condominiums on the site. Wildflower’s devoted customers made their final pilgrimages to the shop. Among them was Cynthia Badan, a longtime seasonal resident whose parents had first introduced her to Glen Arbor, and who had nurtured her own decades-long love affair with the blue waters of Sleeping Bear Bay.
“My parents, Richard and Mimsy Harder, worked at the Leelanau School,” she explains. “On every special occasion, my mom used to take me to Wildflowers. Last year, her birthday was coming up—I thought I’d get one more thing from Wildflowers before it closed—it was the end of an era.”
As Cynthia strolled the grounds, she came upon a building she’d never noticed before. “I think it was where Donna had her Christmas displays—but I’m a summer person, and I’d never been in there. The sales girl said, ‘Everything is for sale—the actual building is for sale!’”
“I called my [adult] kids; three of them were in Glen Arbor. I asked them to come over and look at the depot. I had a crazy idea.”
For 25 years, Cynthia, her kids, and then-husband had had a place on Sleeping Bear Bay. Lake Michigan was her touchstone, a place she’d fallen in love with when her parents came to the Leelanau School in the mid-1980s, where Richard Harder was assistant headmaster and development director, and Mimsy worked in the alumni relations office.
“They lived on Faculty Row, but they knew everyone in town, too,” Cynthia recalls. “They’d go to the ‘Board Meetings’ at the WAG [Western Ave Grill] every Thursday. They knew Norm Wheeler, the Rockwoods.”
The educators’ previous career moves had taken them to the U.S. Virgin Islands from New York when Cynthia was just four years old.
“Every day for eight years, I could look out the window of my school in St. Croix and see that blue water,” she says. “In eighth grade, we moved to Lake Forest, IL, on Lake Michigan, but the colors and the feel of the water were completely different. When I was in college, Dad took the job in Glen Arbor [as development director and assistant headmaster; her mother worked in the alumni office], and he sent me pictures of the lake here. I was like, ‘This is unbelievable—it’s just like St. Croix.’
“My brother and I are both very attached to water; the lake and the ocean. In St. Croix, our parents wanted to give us kids a cultural experience, but their friends and their parents gave them a lot of push back at the time. Now, they live in Maine. They don’t return to the old places where they’ve lived—they’ve only come back to Glen Arbor a couple of times—but they’re happy to think that they helped to create a place for us.” In northern Michigan she feels a deep connection to sand, waves, and sky like those in her Caribbean memories, and she values a place to nurture that sense of belonging for her own children as well.
“Five years ago, we needed to sell our home here on Sleeping Bear Bay. It was very emotional.” Since then, the family had been renting for several weeks each summer—which can be quite expensive for a middle-school French teacher with a family.
At Wildflowers on that fateful day last year, Cynthia’s crazy idea took shape: “What if my kids and I bought this [depot], and put it on a little scrap of land, and put into it all the money we would have spent on an expensive summer rental for the next five years … I told Donna the whole story, and she loved it. We worked out a deal, we shook on it, I gave her five dollars in earnest money.”
Last fall, she also closed on an undeveloped half-acre of land situated near the oxbow of the Crystal River, where Bay Lane meets M-22 and County Road 675. The painted lady carries a tiny footprint that fits well in the site—only 680 square feet, and she’ll have to add just shy of 400 square feet more to meet township zoning regulations for a single-family dwelling. But she’s thrilled with her family’s new adventure—three of her four children are involved in the project—and the chance to create even more connections with the Glen Arbor community.
This spring, builder Tim Newman of Kasson Contracting in Maple City moved the historic depot a fourth—and hopefully, final—time from the Wildflowers site to her new location. The roof had to be removed in order for the lady to make her stately way along M-22, and a rubber membrane was installed to keep weather out, but the graceful rafters with their distinctive pitch will be reinstalled this fall. Newman has already removed later additions— like puzzling barn-style doors—and restored the window openings, whose original trim caps could still be seen above the crude alterations. “He is a real treasure,” says Cynthia of Newman, “a real master craftsman; his handshake is his word.”
Architect Robin Johnson of Empire (who, with her husband Robert Foulkes and Cherry Republic owner Bob Sutherland, developed the New Neighborhood 30 years ago) is assisting with the vision for restoring and rejuvenating the painted lady.
“She had helped us with our old bay cottage, and we reconnected last summer,” Cynthia says. “Robin loves historic buildings. She is an invaluable resource; taking the space that’s there, keeping what is good, preserving the charm. The building is so thick, so solid, with elegant proportions and details, like the brackets. With its 14-16-foot ceilings, it feels so much bigger than it is.
“At first, we had a very different vision. But now we’re back to the simple plan. The building is basically three rooms: we’ll keep the waiting room exactly as it was—we sealed up where the doors and windows had been moved around; someone had lowered the floor in one area for some reason. That will be the living room.
“The middle room, where the ticket booth was, is pretty much intact, and we’re keeping it that way. Maybe the future dining room? Keep the original windows, figure out how to make the building energy efficient. The room at the end—luggage room or cafeteria, or whatever it was— we’re not sure yet what we’ll do there. The additional 400 square feet will be in the back.”
She laughs, “Now it will shine again!”
