The story
Welcome to Grand Beach
Grand Beach was laid out in the dunes early in the twentieth century as a summer resort for Chicagoans, reached by the Michigan Central. Behind its white gates are a village golf course, tree-shaded lanes and three summer houses designed by Frank Lloyd Wright in 1916.
Grand Beach lies on the Lake Michigan shore in the southwest corner of New Buffalo Township, close to the Indiana line, in the country the St. Joseph Potawatomi ceded at the Carey Mission treaty of 1828. Ellis (1880) describes the township's lakeshore as sand that shifts into dunes, and the western part of the township as sandy and of little use for farming. The county histories of 1880 and 1906 have nothing to say about the place, because it did not yet exist.
According to the village's own history, Floyd R. Perkins bought 600 acres of dunes in the western part of the township, first intending a shooting preserve, then saw its promise as a resort. With his partner George Ely he formed the Grand Beach Company and bought more land, including four miles of beach. The company built roads, bridges, a water system and a nine-hole golf course. Wikipedia dates the founding to about 1903 and describes the plan as a resort partly for short stays, served by the Michigan Central Railroad, with rental cottages, a dining hall, bathing and golf.
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The village grew quickly. In 1907, the village history says, residents bought twenty cottages from Sears, Roebuck, and by 1911 there were 48 homes. The golf course grew to eighteen holes, and at one time to twenty-seven, before returning to nine. In 1916 Frank Lloyd Wright designed three summer houses here, for Ernest Vosburgh, Joseph J. Bagley and W. S. Carr. The Vosburgh house is the one least changed since it was built.
In the 1920s a pier with dining and dancing was built out into the lake; its posts can still be seen when the water is low. The Golfmore Hotel, which opened in 1922 just across the creek in neighboring Michiana, was the center of summer and winter social life, with a ski jump, until it burned on November 19, 1939. Ski meets at Grand Beach drew the best jumpers of the day: the Chicago Tribune photographed the Olympic jumper Anders Haugen there in January 1926, when he placed second. Grand Beach was incorporated as a village in 1934 so that its property owners could keep more control over their community. High lake levels have eaten at the beach several times since, most notably in the early 1950s, the early 1970s and the late 2010s. The 2020 census counted 310 people.
