Michigan: The Northern Lower — Pere Cheney, Deward, Port Oneida

Introduction

Everything above the bridge is a trip. These three are a weekend, and two of them are inside two hours of home. They are also the ones where the stories are best, because the northern Lower Peninsula was killed by white pine rather than by ore, and a logging town dies faster and more completely than a mining town — there is no shaft, no headframe, no stone furnace left standing. There is a clearing that used to be a town.

🔴 One phone call covers two of the three. Camp Grayling is roughly 147,000 acres spread across Crawford, Kalkaska and Otsego counties — the same ground as both Pere Cheney and Deward. Much of it is open to public recreation when training is not happening and closed when it is. Check the weekly range report before committing, and call if it is ambiguous.

• Camp Grayling Range Control — 989-344-6156
• Camp Grayling Headquarters — 989-344-6100

Five minutes on the phone is the difference between a scenic two-track and a gate with a soldier behind it.

4.1 Pere Cheney — Beaver Creek Township, Crawford County

Access: open, with rules — township cemetery, posted 8 a.m. to 8 p.m.

Michigan’s most famous ghost town, and the true story is better than the legend attached to it.

What was: settled by lumberjacks in 1874, also called Cheney or Center Plains, about 10 miles southeast of Grayling. Disease swept it in 1893 — the accounts disagree between cholera, diphtheria and smallpox — and the place was completely abandoned by 1917.

What survives: the cemetery, and essentially nothing else. It sits about a mile south of where the town actually stood. Vandals have destroyed nearly everything that was left, of the town and of the cemetery both. The town did not fall down. It was taken apart by people who came to look at it.

⭐ THE FINDING: the site is open, and the hour everybody wants to visit is the one hour it is closed. The cemetery is owned and maintained by Beaver Creek Township and open daily 8 a.m. to 8 p.m., with wooden signs asking for respect and warning against trespass after dark. Every article quotes Crawford County Sheriff Kirk Wakefield saying “We have had a ton of complaints over the years” and readers take it as “stay away.” It is not a closure. It is a response to what happens after eight o’clock. Turn up in daylight and you are simply a lawful visitor to a township cemetery.

⚠ The witch is folklore, and no witch is buried there. Pere Cheney gets ranked on lists of “top witch graves”; the grave the legend attaches to belongs to a real person. The town died of an epidemic and a collapsing lumber economy, which is a sadder and far more interesting story than a curse — and it is the one the headstones actually tell.

🔴 In 2001 two teenagers were caught trying to dig up what they believed was the witch’s grave. Michigan treats disturbing a grave as a felony carrying up to ten years, and the statute reaches accessories before and after the fact — the friend holding the flashlight included. Go in daylight, stay on your feet, touch nothing.

4.2 Deward — the four-county corner, Crawford / Kalkaska / Antrim / Otsego

Access: walk in (state forest) — but see the warning below.

The purest company town on the list. Founded 1901 in sections 7 and 8, T28N R4W, on the upper Manistee River, and named for the lumber baron David Ward (1836–1900), who did not live to see it built. It had one of the largest and most modern sawmills in the country and its own common-carrier railroad — the Detroit and Charlevoix — headquartered in the town. Peak population 800 before 1912.

🔴 It has the most precise death date of anything on this list. The last mill whistle blew on March 16, 1912. The town outlasted the mill by twenty years out of pure inertia: the last family left in August 1932.

Where it is: the townsite and several square miles around it are the Deward Management Area (the Deward Tract), sitting where the Pere Marquette, Mackinaw and Au Sable State Forests meet, near the corner of four counties.

Access reported: about a mile and a half north of West Cameron Bridge Road on Manistee River Road, a two-track heads west, marked with a small green sign carrying a binoculars symbol. Roughly 100 yards to a parking area, then a trail down to the river near the old mill site.

⚠ UNCONFIRMED, AND IT MATTERS: whether the Deward Tract carries special management restrictions. Tracts of this kind are sometimes dedicated natural areas, or carry their own Land Use Order, either of which would change both the driving and the camping answers. Call the DNR Gaylord or Grayling field office and ask specifically about (a) camping restrictions inside the Deward Tract and (b) which forest roads within it are open. Do that before planning a night there, not after arriving and finding a sign. DNR general line: 517-284-7275.

4.3 Port Oneida — Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore, Leelanau County

Access: open, with rules — National Park Service, entrance pass.

⭐ This is the answer to “abandoned houses,” and it is better than the version we were originally looking for.

3,400 acres — one of the largest and most complete historic agricultural landscapes in public ownership anywhere in the country — holding 121 contributing buildings, five sites and 20 structures dating from 1870 to 1945. Farmhouses, barns, milk houses, sugar shacks. Empty, standing in their own fields, with trails running between them and Lake Michigan behind.

What happened here: first settled in 1852, founded as a community in the early 1860s, largely by German immigrants who sold cordwood to the steamers passing on Lake Michigan. When lumber demand collapsed in the 1890s they turned to farming, and farmed until the Park Service bought them out. It is on the National Register for agriculture, ethnic heritage and European settlement.

Start at the Charles & Hattie Olsen Farm, now the Port Oneida Heritage Center, and walk out from there.

⭐ The trade this project recommends making. The derelict farmhouse you find down a private two-track is a misdemeanour the moment you step through the door, and you get twenty minutes in it looking over your shoulder. Port Oneida is a hundred and twenty-one of them, with the doors open, for as long as you want, on a pass that costs less than a tank of fuel.

⚠ NPS land is not state land — dispersed camping rules do not apply here at all. Camping is in designated Park Service campgrounds only. Treat Port Oneida as a day destination on a trip that sleeps somewhere else.