{"id":5519,"date":"2024-06-29T12:36:50","date_gmt":"2024-06-29T16:36:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/betsiecurrent.com\/?p=5519"},"modified":"2024-06-30T09:33:04","modified_gmt":"2024-06-30T13:33:04","slug":"platte-river-park-honor-michigan","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/betsiecurrent.com\/index.php\/platte-river-park-honor-michigan\/","title":{"rendered":"Platte River Park, A Natural Resource Treasure"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Investing in nature equals economic payoff<\/em><\/h2>\n\n\n\n

By Keith Schneider<\/strong>
Current Contributor<\/strong>

From the place where it slips out of Lake Ann in Benzie County\u2019s 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 \u201cblue ribbon\u201d trout streams<\/a> in Michigan\u2019s lower peninsula, the Platte\u2019s 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\u2019s 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\u2019s Civilian Conservation Corps during the 1930s and 1940s. The third era opened in the mid-1960s, when Benzie\u2019s restored natural character inspired public policy to protect it, and that has been unfolding ever since with increasing urgency, intelligence, and commitment. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"Platte
The initial idea for Platte River Park came from Esther VanHammen (99), the owner of a cottage resort on Platte Lake. She alerted the Honor Area Restoration Project (HARP) that Oral Kuck\u2019s big parcel along the west bank of the river was on the market. Having opened on May 18, 2024, Platte River Park is 52 acres, including 1,500 feet of river frontage. Photo by Keith Schneider.<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

The banks of the Platte River\u2014logged, healed, and now secure\u2014have 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<\/strong>
Before illustrating the steps that led to the new park, here is a list of other environmental successes along the river. 

 \u2022 In the late 1960s, under the leadership of Howard Tanner\u2014a fisheries scientist and director of the Michigan Department of Natural Resources (DNR)\u2014the 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.

 \u2022 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. 

 \u2022 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: <\/strong>Annis Pratt profiled CRA’s good works in 2022<\/a> in The Betsie Current<\/em>; in 2016, The Betsie Current<\/em> published \u201cA Bridge Story: Protecting bridges and saving fish on the Betsie,\u201d<\/a> which chronicled a similar project along the Betsie River; find it in our online archives.)

 \u2022 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,<\/a> and one of very few across the country, where harmful algal blooms were solved in this century. (Editor\u2019s Note: <\/strong>This same author, Keith Schneider, profiled the work of Swiecke and the PLIA in The Betsie Current\u2019<\/em>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\u2019s healing of forests and waterways\u2014damaged by the 19th- and early 20th-century logging era\u2014merged 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\u2014a place where people act on opportunities to safeguard the land, the waters, and their small towns. 

The Present<\/strong>
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. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"Platte
In addition to the cost of the property, Honor Area Restoration Project (HARP) has raised almost $900,000 more to establish a paved trail, several riverbank-viewing platforms, and a kayak and canoe launch. Photo by Keith Schneider.<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

The meeting attracted 150 participants, who reached consensus on two salient projects. The first was renovating Honor\u2019s 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\u2014close to the town center\u2014as an economic asset.\u00a0

No one was clear at the time what that really meant.\u00a0

In 2017, though, Esther VanHammen (now 99), the owner of a cottage resort on Platte Lake, alerted HARP that Oral Kuck\u2019s big parcel along the west bank of the river was on the market.\u00a0

Kuck\u2014a much-loved character in Honor, who was born in 1910\u2014was 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).\u00a0

\u201cEsther came to us and said, \u2018Hey, do you guys know about this property that\u2019s for sale? Wouldn\u2019t that just make a great public park?\u2019 So we took her word and went over to look at it,\u201d\u00a0 Johansson says. \u201cShe was so right. Look at this\u201452 acres; 1,500 feet of river frontage. Perfect for a park to highlight the Platte River. That\u2019s how it came about. She had the vision for this early on.\u201d

VanHammen\u2019s 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\u2014an executive for 30 years with the county\u2019s Community Mental Health agency, now known as Centra Wellness\u2014had 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\u2019s award-winning public transit agency. Additionally, he and his wife, Lisa, are peerless musicians and in 1982 formed Song of the Lakes<\/a>, 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.\u00a0

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.\u00a0

The new infrastructure was displayed on Saturday, May 18, during the park\u2019s official opening party.\u00a0

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.\u00a0

\u201cWe\u2019re not finished,\u201d Johansson says. \u201cThe whole gist of doing all this stuff is not just because it\u2019s nice, and it\u2019s fun, and it\u2019s beautiful. It\u2019s about economic development, right? It\u2019s about attracting new people to stop in the village\u2014you know, the whole thing that happens when people stop in a place. Place-making is what the whole park is.\u201d

There are two more inspiring details about Platte River Park\u2014its development occurred during a particularly raucous period in Michigan and the United States.\u00a0

The COVID-19 pandemic slowed but did not stop the fundraising, design, and construction of the park\u2019s initial infrastructure. Nor was the idea of a new public park\u2014a big one at that\u2014snared in the ugly web of contemporary politics that hangs over Benzie, the state, and the nation.\u00a0

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.\u00a0

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 <\/em>RestoreHonorMI.org<\/em><\/a> online or <\/em>\u201cHonor Area Restoration Project\u201d on Facebook<\/em><\/a>. Email <\/em>HonorAreaRestorationProject@gmail.com<\/em><\/a> with any questions.<\/em>

Featured Photo Caption: <\/strong>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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Investing in nature equals payoff<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":22,"featured_media":5521,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[282,41,289,56,198,191,44,206],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"http:\/\/betsiecurrent.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/PlatteRiverPark2.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3TDCr-1r1","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/betsiecurrent.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5519"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/betsiecurrent.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/betsiecurrent.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/betsiecurrent.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/22"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/betsiecurrent.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5519"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"http:\/\/betsiecurrent.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5519\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5529,"href":"http:\/\/betsiecurrent.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5519\/revisions\/5529"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/betsiecurrent.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/5521"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/betsiecurrent.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5519"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/betsiecurrent.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5519"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/betsiecurrent.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5519"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}