Investing in nature equals economic payoff

By Keith Schneider
Current Contributor

From the place where it slips out of Lake Ann in Benzie County’s northeast corner, Platte River haunts a landscape of forest and open fields, steals past the Lake Ann village of 330 residents, crosses a mighty and silent wetland, fills a couple of small lakes and a big lake, and then, nearly 30 miles from where it started, reaches a curved sand inlet where it empties into an even bigger Lake Michigan. 

One of the 49 “blue ribbon” trout streams in Michigan’s lower peninsula, the Platte’s clear waters sparkle in the sunlight of a blue-sky day. Cedars along the banks open their branches, as if to salute the splendor.

Still, there is considerably more to the river’s story than its compelling beauty. 

In the 160 years since the watershed was settled by immigrants from the East Coast of the United States and from Europe, the river has flowed through three distinctive eras in Benzie County. 

The decades of rapacious logging in the late 19th and early 20th centuries distinguished the first. That was followed by a half-century of healing the waters and the forests, helped by the thousands of red pine seedlings planted by President Franklin Roosevelt’s Civilian Conservation Corps during the 1930s and 1940s. The third era opened in the mid-1960s, when Benzie’s restored natural character inspired public policy to protect it, and that has been unfolding ever since with increasing urgency, intelligence, and commitment. 

The banks of the Platte River—logged, healed, and now secure—have served as a stage for every era.

On May 18, 2024, a new act in the drama occurred when the Honor Area Restoration Project (HARP) culminated nearly a decade of citizen engagement and a keen public-private financing strategy to formally open Platte River Park. The 52-acre expanse of forest, blueberries, and meadows flanks 1,550 feet of undeveloped riverfront. 

Platte River Park adds to the legacy of stewardship that has helped make Benzie the greenest county in Michigan.

The History
Before illustrating the steps that led to the new park, here is a list of other environmental successes along the river. 

 • In the late 1960s, under the leadership of Howard Tanner—a fisheries scientist and director of the Michigan Department of Natural Resources (DNR)—the coho, chinook, and steelhead fishery launched from the state hatchery along the Platte, just north of Honor. The purpose: curbing the alewife plague soiling Lake Michigan beaches.

 • In 1970, Congress acted on the idea from former Interior Secretary Stewart Udall and established Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore, which protected the last miles of the Platte River. 

 • The Conservation Resource Alliance (CRA), led by Amy Beyer, raised state, federal, and private funds since the 1990s to rebuild road crossings and take other measures to halt erosion along the river.  (Editor’s Note: Annis Pratt profiled CRA’s good works in 2022 in The Betsie Current; in 2016, The Betsie Current published “A Bridge Story: Protecting bridges and saving fish on the Betsie,” which chronicled a similar project along the Betsie River; find it in our online archives.)

 • In the 2020s, the Platte Lake Improvement Association, led by Wilfred Swiecke, completed a 40-year campaign to clear Big Platte Lake of an annual toxic algae bloom. The Association won a court victory that compelled the (previously mentioned) state salmon hatchery upstream to change its fish-feeding and waste-management practices to dramatically reduce phosphorus discharges that caused the blooms. Platte Lake is the only major water body in Michigan, and one of very few across the country, where harmful algal blooms were solved in this century. (Editor’s Note: This same author, Keith Schneider, profiled the work of Swiecke and the PLIA in The Betsie Current’s  November 3, 2022, issue; this is available in our online archives.)

All told, the conservation initiatives along the Platte River are important chapters in the meta-narrative that has developed in Benzie County over the last half-century. Nature’s healing of forests and waterways—damaged by the 19th- and early 20th-century logging era—merged with the local, state, and national environmental protection policies since the 1960s. 

The consequence is an uncommonly beautiful county that is the foundation of a flourishing economy—a place where people act on opportunities to safeguard the land, the waters, and their small towns. 

The Present
In every way imaginable, Platte River Park fits into that story. Its genesis was, perhaps quite ironically, a public meeting at the now-closed Platte River Elementary School; a meeting convened in 2011 by the Honor Area Restoration Project to decide on community economic development goals. Formed a year earlier by Honor residents Ingemar Johansson (74) and Bruce Wilde (79), HARP sought to energize local businesses in a community that had been disrupted by the Great Recession in 2007 and 2008. 

Clearly, Johansson and Wilde were not the only residents interested in that goal. 

The meeting attracted 150 participants, who reached consensus on two salient projects. The first was renovating Honor’s streetscape, including a walkway from the town center to the shopping plaza, south of town. The second was leveraging the magnificent reach of the Platte River—close to the town center—as an economic asset. 

No one was clear at the time what that really meant. 

In 2017, though, Esther VanHammen (now 99), the owner of a cottage resort on Platte Lake, alerted HARP that Oral Kuck’s big parcel along the west bank of the river was on the market. 

Kuck—a much-loved character in Honor, who was born in 1910—was raised and spent his life in the house built, and on the land developed, by his father, J.C. Kuck. The younger Kuck farmed blueberries and tended bees. Before he died in the 1990s, Kuck helped Kirk and Sharon Jones to get started on their Sleeping Bear Farms honey business in Beulah, which has since expanded to the popular Beedazzled (soaps and candles) and St. Ambrose Cellars (mead, beer, and food). 

“Esther came to us and said, ‘Hey, do you guys know about this property that’s for sale? Wouldn’t that just make a great public park?’ So we took her word and went over to look at it,”  Johansson says. “She was so right. Look at this—52 acres; 1,500 feet of river frontage. Perfect for a park to highlight the Platte River. That’s how it came about. She had the vision for this early on.”

VanHammen’s alert and the availability of the Kuck farm came at a good time for HARP. Already seven years old, the citizen group had formed a capable board, recruited a peerless Manistee-based fundraiser named Tim Ervin, and established itself as a community facilitator for new projects in town, including eight new units of affordable housing. In one memorable event, former Senator Carl Levin (D-Michigan) attended a HARP meeting and awarded the group a $20,000 federal grant.

HARP also had a capable president in Ingemar Johansson. Johansson—an executive for 30 years with the county’s Community Mental Health agency, now known as Centra Wellness—had already distinguished himself as a civic leader during a decade of organizing and advocacy that led in 2005 to the opening of Benzie Bus, the county’s award-winning public transit agency. Additionally, he and his wife, Lisa, are peerless musicians and in 1982 formed Song of the Lakes, a popular folk music band whose bright sea-shanty catalog serves as the soundtrack of Benzie County.

In other words, Johansson was a noted citizen advocate when he sought $350,000 to buy the Kuck property. 

He found a willing audience at the Grand Traverse Regional Land Conservancy in Traverse City, which has been active in land conservation in Benzie since its founding in the early 1990s. The conservancy purchased the Kuck property in 2018 under an agreement that it would be reimbursed; the payback came fairly quickly from grants awarded by the Michigan DNR and several foundations.

To date, HARP has raised almost $900,000 more to establish a paved trail, several riverbank viewing platforms, and a kayak and canoe launch. 

The new infrastructure was displayed on Saturday, May 18, during the park’s official opening party. 

HARP donated the park to Homestead Township and is intent on raising an endowment, to ensure that the township has a permanent source of funds for its maintenance. Johansson also says that $2 million more is needed to complete other assets, including a new entrance, a pavilion and picnic area, a trail system, a riverside boardwalk, and a walkway to the Honor village center. 

“We’re not finished,” Johansson says. “The whole gist of doing all this stuff is not just because it’s nice, and it’s fun, and it’s beautiful. It’s about economic development, right? It’s about attracting new people to stop in the village—you know, the whole thing that happens when people stop in a place. Place-making is what the whole park is.”

There are two more inspiring details about Platte River Park—its development occurred during a particularly raucous period in Michigan and the United States. 

The COVID-19 pandemic slowed but did not stop the fundraising, design, and construction of the park’s initial infrastructure. Nor was the idea of a new public park—a big one at that—snared in the ugly web of contemporary politics that hangs over Benzie, the state, and the nation. 

From the outset, Platte River Park made sense to Honor residents, because it featured goals that matter. A persistent group of visionary residents succeeded, with public acclaim, in conserving a beautiful place as a durable asset to their community. 

Bravo for a job very well done.

Platte River Park is located along US-31, west of the Village of Honor; the entrance is located on Indian Hill Road. To learn more, visit RestoreHonorMI.org online or “Honor Area Restoration Project” on Facebook. Email HonorAreaRestorationProject@gmail.com with any questions.

Featured Photo Caption: Ingemar Johansson (74), co-founder of Honor Area Restoration Project (HARP), at the formal opening of Platte River Park in Honor on May 18, 2024. Photo by Keith Schneider.