The story
Welcome to Lakeside
Lakeside is a shoreline community in southwest Chikaming Township, where Alfred and Mary Ames made a home in the forest above Lake Michigan in 1844. It grew from a lumber pier into a summer resort, and its Lakeside Inn, a Craftsman hotel on the bluff, is on the National Register of Historic Places.
Lakeside lies in the country south and west of the St. Joseph River that the Potawatomi ceded to the United States at the Carey Mission in 1828. Franklin Ellis (1880) and Orville Coolidge (1906) both say that Chikaming, the township’s name, is an Indian word meaning “lake.” Ellis records that in the 1840s Native families were often camped between the Ameses’ cabin and New Buffalo.
They were not the township’s first settlers: Ellis (pp. 232–233) puts Luman Northrop, with a cabin and mill on section 23 about 1840, and Richard Peckham, farming on section 20 in 1843, ahead of them. Alfred and Mary Ames were both from Vermont. Ellis says Ames bought 78 acres of wild, heavily timbered land on section 30 in 1844, hired choppers and worked in the woods all winter, and that the couple began keeping house there in the spring of 1845. There was no bridge over the Galien River, so to reach New Buffalo Ames often swam it, carrying his clothes on his head. The farm became known far and near as “Clay Banks.” In 1847 Mary Ames gathered nine children in her house and taught the first school in the township; Ellis adds that she won some reputation as a writer of poetry and prose for the magazines of the day. Alfred Ames died of smallpox on March 4, 1864, the same day as both of his wife’s parents.
Read the full story
The settlement grew with the lumber trade. In September 1854 J. N. Wilkinson & Co., a firm of brothers from Virginia, bought most of section 19 from Truman A. Clough at ten dollars an acre. They built a boarding house and a store, ran a pier 600 feet into the lake for loading lumber and cordwood, and put up a steam sawmill that cut 6,000 feet a day. Ellis says they employed 50 to 100 men, mostly in the woods; Coolidge says 50 to 150. The firm went on to buy 2,500 acres and to build the Greenbush and Pike piers and a horse railroad into the timber. A post office named Wilkinson opened in 1858, and the first township election, in April 1856, was held at the firm’s store. Coolidge says the place was known as Wilkinson’s station and afterwards as Lakeside; Walter Romig and the Berrien County Genealogical Society agree that Lakeside was first called Wilkinson.
When the Chicago and Michigan Lake Shore Railroad opened in 1870, Ellis writes, a Lakeside post office was established at Wilkinson Station, with John S. Gibson as postmaster. Coolidge’s 1906 biography of Gibson says he built his home in Lakeside in 1873, that the office was established through his efforts about 1878, and that he kept it for nineteen years. Fruit and market farming followed the timber. John C. Morgan’s Lake Side Farm, pictured in Ellis’s history, shipped cider, jellies, vine seeds and sweet corn to New York and Philadelphia, and by 1906 the Lakeside Vineyard Company had set out 525 acres of grapes on sections 21 and 28, which Coolidge calls the largest grapery in the state. A Lakeside Anti-Horse Thief Association was organized in 1876, and the Glidden brothers kept the general store.
From the 1880s Ames Grove, a wooded property owned by Fisher Ames, was a favorite spot for picnics and outdoor gatherings. John Aylsworth bought the property in 1901, and the state historical marker says the Lakeside Inn was operating by 1915, with its own zoo and gardens; Chicago orchestras played there in the 1930s and 1940s. The inn housed the Lakeside Center for the Arts from 1968 to 1994 and was restored to its 1920s appearance in 1995. It was listed on the National Register in 2009. Lakeside is not counted separately by the census.