Pier Cove

Sit on the Lake Michigan shore just south of where the old lumber docks used to run, and you're looking at what used to be one of the busiest ports between St. Joseph and Muskegon. The piers that gave this place its name stretched several hundred feet into the water—gone now, destroyed by ice and storms more than a century ago—but the rocky beach remains, prized by people hunting for septarian nodules locals call lightning stones. A historical marker from nineteen eighty-nine sits near the public access point, a reminder of the days when eight thousand baskets of peaches shipped out in a single afternoon and cordwood and tanbark left daily for Chicago and Milwaukee. The 1860 Methodist parsonage still stands on Lakeshore Drive, one of the few buildings that witnessed the port's heyday and its quiet fade.