The story
Welcome to Union Pier
Union Pier is a lakeshore community on the line between Chikaming and New Buffalo townships. It began as a lumber pier built by a union of local businessmen, became a handle-factory village when the railroad came, and grew into a summer place whose visitors have included Chicago writers, Jewish resort families and Lithuanian immigrants.
Union Pier 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. Walter Romig (1973) and the Berrien County Genealogical Society both say the place was first called Townline, from its position on the line between Chikaming and New Buffalo townships.
Its name came from the lumber trade. Orville Coolidge (1906) says that John F. and Frank Gowdy, natives of New York, settled in the southwest corner of Chikaming and, with others, built a large pier near the New Buffalo line, and a mill at the same time; “this point was called Union Pier.” Romig says it was the business union of C. H. Goodwin, John F. Gowdy and the six McCartan brothers, building a sawmill and a pier, that gave the place its name; the Genealogical Society dates the renaming to about 1870.
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Franklin Ellis (1880) gives the details. Clement H. Goodwin of Aurora, Illinois, and his nephew Richard M. Goodwin came in 1862, bought land on fractional section 25, and built a sawmill, a brick store and a pier, shipping cordwood, lumber and railroad ties, with a horse railroad running back into the woods. A mill built at Union Pier by Goodwin and Gowdy about 1863 was still running in William Gowdy’s hands in 1879. Clement Goodwin died about 1871; Richard became one of the leading men of the township and its supervisor in 1893.
The Chicago and Michigan Lake Shore Railroad reached the lakeshore in 1870, and Ellis says a post office was then opened at Union Pier with William T. Green as postmaster. In 1873 Sanborn and Gowdy started a handle factory beside the tracks, about three miles from New Buffalo, which R. M. Goodwin took over in 1875; with a 75-horsepower engine and about 30 men, it shipped to Chicago, the South and the East. In 1879 Union Pier also had a sawmill and a brick store. The Union Pier Baptist Church was organized on August 7, 1869, with thirteen members from the Fisher, Wilkinson, Vandy and Gowdy families, and had 42 members ten years later.
In the twentieth century Union Pier became a summer place. In 1914 a group of Chicago writers and artists, among them Sherwood Anderson and Ben Hecht, spent the summer at Eli Camp’s cottages on the beach; Anderson’s biographers say the local people disapproved of the visitors, and the colony did not return. In 1924 Louis and Lena Gordon built the Gordon Beach Inn, the center of a resort neighborhood for Jewish families named after them; the state marker says they lost it in the Depression, that Robert Miller, an African American former Chicago alderman, bought it in the 1960s as Gordon Beach was becoming integrated, and that it was restored in 1991. After World War II many Lithuanian immigrants settled in Union Pier, and several Lithuanian institutions remain. Union Pier is not counted separately by the census.