9 Of The Most Eccentric Towns In Michigan
Michigan does weird well. Behind the postcard lakeshores and cherry orchards sits a state that crowns a magic capital, builds a town out of an imported Dutch windmill, and hides fine art on its public restrooms. These nine towns lean all the way into the eccentric, and they are better for it. Here are the quirkiest corners of the Great Lakes State.
Colon
Every August, a village of about 1,200 people roughly doubles in size as magicians pour in from around the world. Colon is the Magic Capital of the World, a title the US Congress has actually recognized, and it earned it the hard way. Illusionist Harry Blackstone Sr. settled here in the 1920s, his friend Percy Abbott opened a magic shop, and Abbott's Magic Company has been cranking out tricks and hosting the annual Magic Get-Together ever since 1934. The obsession is everywhere, from the bronze stars of the Magic Walk of Fame to the high school teams that play as the Magi. It even follows you to the grave. Lakeside Cemetery holds more buried magicians than anywhere on Earth, dozens of them, each sent off with a broken-wand ceremony.
Charlevoix
Charlevoix looks like a fairy tale a bricklayer built by hand. Between the 1920s and 1950s, self-taught designer Earl Young ignored every rule of architecture and studded the town with squat stone cottages under wavy, drooping cedar roofs that locals have called the "mushroom houses" ever since. The homes are private, but you can walk straight into Young's imagination downtown at Stafford's Weathervane Restaurant, where boulders are stacked willy-nilly against the wall and the dining-room fireplace is crowned with a nine-ton glacial rock and, for good measure, a meteorite. Charlevoix also insists it once baked the world's biggest cherry pie, and a concrete slice in a giant tin pan makes the case, even if nearby Traverse City holds the actual Guinness record. Sitting pretty between Lake Michigan and Lake Charlevoix does not hurt either.
Ypsilanti
Ypsilanti, "Ypsi" to anyone who lives there, is a funky college town that happens to own one of the most snickered-at landmarks in America. In 2003, Cabinet magazine crowned the Ypsilanti Water Tower the world's most phallic building, and the town has leaned into the joke ever since. The 1890s brick tower is genuinely handsome Queen Anne work, right down to the four crosses its superstitious builders carved into the stone, and it is watched over by a bust of the Greek war hero the town is named for. Look past the giggles and Ypsi runs deep on art and history, with the gallery-packed campus of Eastern Michigan University and a downtown that celebrates local Black history, including a tribute to inventor Elijah McCoy, the original "real McCoy."
Frankenmuth
Frankenmuth commits to a bit like nowhere else in the state. The whole town is dressed as a Bavarian village, and it means it, right down to the Bavarian Inn's Glockenspiel, which reenacts the Pied Piper several times a day, and the 74-foot Figurinespiel tower at the Cheese Haus, whose little doors pop open to tell a ten-minute animated story about cheese. The main event is Bronner's Christmas Wonderland, the largest Christmas store on the planet, where 27 acres of grounds and 100,000 lights keep the holidays glowing 361 days a year, July heat be damned. Add a family-style chicken dinner and a paddlewheel cruise down the Cass River aboard the Bavarian Belle, and you have peak Michigan kitsch.
Holland
Holland is exactly as Dutch as it sounds, and then some. The centerpiece is De Zwaan, a 250-year-old working windmill shipped over from the Netherlands in the 1960s. It is the only authentic Dutch windmill the Dutch ever let leave the country, and it still grinds flour on an island in the middle of town. Come spring, the streets disappear under millions of tulips for the Tulip Time Festival, where wooden-shoe "klompen" dancers scrub the pavement in the old street-washing tradition. Throw in a re-created Dutch village, a working wooden-shoe factory, and Delftware in every shop window, and Holland feels less like a themed attraction than a slice of the old country transplanted onto the Lake Michigan shore.
Mackinac Island
Mackinac Island runs on horsepower, the literal kind. Motor vehicles have been banned here since 1898, so the only way around is by bike, on foot, or behind a horse, and the clip-clop of hooves is the island's constant soundtrack. Then there is the fudge. The island is so devoted to it that day-trippers are affectionately called "fudgies," and the shop windows are a nonstop parade of copper kettles and marble slabs. Presiding over all of it is the Grand Hotel, whose 660-foot front porch is billed as the longest in the world and still enforces a jackets-after-six dress code. The result is a Victorian time capsule that quietly decided the 20th century could wait.
Saugatuck
Saugatuck is Michigan's "Art Coast," and it proves it in the most Saugatuck way possible, by hiding a masterpiece on a public bathroom. Artist Carol Miron painted a full reproduction of Georges Seurat's "A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte" across the restroom building in Wicks Park, and the crowd of parasol-toting Parisians has cheerfully stuck around through every renovation since. The town's other beloved oddity floats on the Kalamazoo River: a hand-cranked chain ferry named the Diane, where a deckhand still turns a crank to haul passengers across, exactly as it was done in the 1800s. Climb the 303 steps up Mount Baldhead afterward, and the whole quirky scene spreads out below.
Grand Haven
Every summer night, Grand Haven puts on a show that sounds made up until you see it. The Grand Haven Musical Fountain, billed as the world's largest musical fountain, has been firing choreographed jets of water into the sky in time with music and colored lights since 1962, with the whole town gathering along the waterfront to watch. It is gloriously old-school civic spectacle, a Cold War-era engineering flex that a small Lake Michigan town simply never stopped running. Beyond the fountain, Grand Haven plays up its lakeside good looks with a long boardwalk, a candy-red pier lighthouse, and some of the best sunsets on the big lake.
Ishpeming
Deep in the Upper Peninsula, Ishpeming is where "Yooper" humor gets a permanent home. Da Yoopers Tourist Trap, dreamed up by the UP comedy band of the same name, is a shrine to gloriously oversized nonsense. Meet Big Gus, billed as the world's largest working chainsaw; Big Ernie, the world's largest working rifle; and Christine On Steroids, a 1957 Buick that somebody bolted a snowplow onto. There is real history under the gags, too. This is old iron-mining country, marked by the stone obelisks standing over abandoned shafts at the Cliffs Shaft Mine Museum and by Jasper Knob, a bluff banded in gray iron ore and red jasper quartz that once had prospectors convinced they had struck it rich.
Embrace Michigan's Weird Side
Michigan will always have its dunes and its lighthouses, but the towns worth writing home about are the ones that let their freak flag fly. Whether it is a village that reveres magicians, a town that never grew out of its Bavarian phase, or an island that told the automobile to get lost, these nine places prove the Great Lakes State is at its best when it gets a little weird.
