A half century after it closed, the oldest inn in the national park system is open once again to laughter, the best night’s sleep ever, home cooking, lifetime memories and even romance. For a storied stay, book a room at Sleeping Bear Inn.
This article first appeared in Traverse Northern Michigan. Find this story and more when you explore our magazine library. Want Traverse delivered to your door or inbox monthly? View our print subscription and digital subscription options.
On a cool autumn day last year, the 39 panes of antique glass that line the porch of the Sleeping Bear Inn framed a scene that has changed little since time immemorial: The Manitou Islands floated on the deep blue water of Sleeping Bear Bay, golden sun bounced off creamy sand, and the three white pines across the road braced against the stiff lake wind that keeps them as stunted and shorn as though deliberately shaped by a bonsai master. Inside the inn’s enclosed porch, innkeepers Maggie and Jeff Kato had lit a fire in the old brick hearth in preparation for a small wedding ceremony. “The porch was filled with warmth, sunshine and love,” Maggie recalls.
While this intimate ceremony marked the beginning of the bride and groom’s life together, it held special significance to the Katos: it was the first public event to be held in the old inn, set in the Lake Michigan hamlet of Glen Haven, since the National Park Service shuttered it in 1972 as the Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore was being established. And that fact had everything to do with the Katos and their calculated—albeit gutsy—decision to toss out conventionality, sell the home in Flushing where they’d raised their five children, and move to this Northern Michigan outpost.
True, the inn wasn’t actually open on that autumn day—wedding guests could go no farther than the porch. It would be another 10 months before the Katos began taking reservations. But while the list of what still needed to be done was long, the Katos and their contractor, the MacGyver-esque character George MacEachern, had already moved proverbial mountains to rescue the circa-1860 building, working through issues as diverse as financing and bureaucratic red tape, to reglazing those antique windows.“We felt our hard work fully restoring the porch down to every pane of glass was worthwhile as people celebrated together in this special place,” Maggie says.
Photo by Allison Jarrell Acosta
Photo by Allison Jarrell Acosta
Because of the trios’ ingenuity, hands-on labor and so much more, life was returning to this building that had once been the center of the storybook-like kingdom of Glen Haven, a town that had lasted through the better part of two centuries. It was a place chock full of life in all its glory—old-school hospitality, laughter, gossip, home-cooked meals that stuffed you so full you hurt, euchre games in front of a spitting fire, scandalous trysts and even a couple of frontier fairytale romances. “That building had so much character it could talk to you,” recalls Robin Lambkin, who waitressed there in the late 1960s through the inn’s last summer.
The Katos were determined to recreate as much of that vibrant and historic ambiance as possible, right down to the homemade pancakes—the giant, fluffy pillows turned out of the kitchen that the last innkeeper, Nellie Day, had presided over from the 1930s until the inn’s final day in 1972.
Photo by Allison Jarrell Acosta
Before there was Nellie Day, there was DH Day, Nellie’s father-in-law and once one of the most colorful figures along the eastern Lake Michigan coast. Day stepped off a steamer in 1878 to take a job in the village—and ended up acquiring the inn and everything around it in three years, earning the nickname King of Glen Haven. During his first 10 years there, Day lodged at the inn, where he pledged to someday marry Eva Farrant, the innkeeper’s pretty daughter—a promise he later kept.
Thus began the Camelot era in Glen Haven, when the little village in the enchanted setting hummed with life. Meeting the steamers that docked across from the inn, bringing summer resorters up from Chicago, was a major social event, one that often ended in the inn’s dining room. Winters were quieter but no less charmed, given that DH built an indoor skating/curling rink across the road from the inn for the village children—including his own large brood.
Photo by Allison Jarrell Acosta
In 1934, after DH died, his son-in-law Louis Warnes (once DH’s chauffeur who had somewhat scandalously married DH’s daughter Marion) started the Sleeping Bear Dunesmobile rides, their shiny cars stored in the garages next to the inn. The drivers dressed in starched white shirts, pressed blue trousers, ties and, in the early years, pith helmets. All-in-all, recalls Lambkin, “They were a flotilla of God’s gift to women.” Breakfast, lunch and breaks, the drivers headed to the inn to be served by (and flirt with) waitresses in white dresses and aprons who’d learned proper serving etiquette from Nellie Day. By then, the ambitious Nellie had risen in the family ranks to become innkeeper. Her hair always pulled back in a well-sprayed twist, Nellie commanded the goings-on from her big desk in the corner of the parlor, along with her fat black cat named Tom who lived on liver, cream and cookies.
The inn’s 10 rooms and its dining room (open to the public) were packed all summer. Once every season, GM executives booked the inn while photographing the company’s latest cars on the dunes. Lambkin recalls one morning when one of the housekeepers pulled her aside to whisper that she’d found two beds pushed together and she didn’t think the couple leaving the room were married. “She assured me she pushed them back apart,” Lambkin says, laughing.
Photo by Allison Jarrell Acosta
The dune car rides and the inn were at their apex of popularity when the government closed them to establish the park. An eerie quietness settled over Glen Haven, and over the next half-century, the pounding weather off Sleeping Bear Bay took its toll on the old building. Still, the massive beams, hewn from the virgin timber that surrounded the village, stood strong. “We felt that it had so much life to give,” says Maggie.
The Inn had passed its sesquicentennial when the stars began to align for its renaissance. Soon after taking the helm at Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore in 2016, Superintendent Scott Tucker decided to revive an old goal that had languished for decades in a 1990s National Park Service planning document: to find a partner to lease the inn and adaptively reuse it. Tucker well knew the search would be akin to finding a needle in the haystack. “Let’s see if we can find someone who has the dedication and passion to bring it back to life, [even when] you don’t own the building, the government owns it. You have to meet all of the Secretary of Interior’s standards for historic preservation. And you have to work with a bureaucratic beast that is the federal government,”Tucker says.
Tucker put Sleeping Bear Chief Ranger Phil Akers (now the superintendent of Dinosaur National Monument in Utah) in charge of sending out an RFP to the public seeking interested parties. Two proposals had already been turned down when Maggie happened to read a news story about it in 2017. She was intrigued—she and Jeff had been mulling their next chapter of life, and she suspected their unique résumés might suit this project. Together they had grown the Genesee County Habitat for Humanity from a three-person staff with $500,000 to a 20-person staff and $6 million budget in just over a decade. In the process, they’d overseen the building of 150 new homes and 500 rehabbed homes, coordinating everything from contractors to bankers and community organizations along the way.
Photo by Allison Jarrell Acosta
But it was the qualities in the humans behind that résumé that equally impressed Akers and Tucker on the August day in 2018 when they first met the couple. “I don’t think there’s any ego involved with the Katos,” says Tucker. “They’re here for the right reasons, which is to provide a visitor opportunity in a historic inn that will create lifetime memories for the public.”
The Katos signed an initial contract with the government to run the inn in 2020, but the process screeched to a stop during the Covid-19 shutdown and its aftermath. It took two more years before the actual lease was ready for signing. In true Maggie and Jeff style, however, they let no grass grow—forming the nonprofit Balancing Environment and Rehabilitation (BEAR) and inviting MacEachern, with whom they’d worked with at Habitat for Humanity, onboard as head of construction.
Funding was obviously a huge consideration. The projected cost for the renovation was $1.8 million. The Katos contributed the first $350,000 from the sale of their home, then went on to raise almost another $400,000 from private donations. That left approximately $1 million dollars, a tough sell to any financial lender given that the government would own the building regardless of what happened—so there was no collateral. But Oxford Bank, the bank the Katos had turned to so many times in their crucial work for Genesee Habitat for Humanity, came to the rescue. “They came up to see the project and they said, ‘We see the money we put in coming back,’” Jeff says. “We love our bank. Without them this would probably not have happened,” he adds.
Photo by Allison Jarrell Acosta
In 2022, with all ducks finally in a row, the Katos signed a 40-year lease for the Sleeping Bear Inn and with the federal government. In the wake of that occasion, Tucker uncovered a grand fact about the long-neglected inn: it is the oldest overnight lodging building in the entire National Park system—beating out National Park all-stars like The Ahwahnee (1927) in Yosemite and the Grand Canyon’s El Tovar (1905).
The Bear Team’s real work, however, had just begun. In the winter of 2022, the Katos and MacEachern dove into the DIY renovation with gusto. Working in the unheated building, the team demolished walls, ripped out ancient plumbing, tore out the floor of a sagging addition tacked on in the 1920s and went on to repair the old foundation. They sanded and painted until their arms were numb. MacEachern’s ingenuity never ceased to amaze the Katos, as when he simmered the antique brass window hardware in a crockpot with Dawn dish soap to remove old paint. They ended each day covered in dust, dirt, cobwebs and anything else that had floated or crawled into the structure over the course of a half century.
Photo by Allison Jarrell Acosta
Photo by Allison Jarrell Acosta
Photo by Allison Jarrell Acosta
All of that, and this warm, vibrant couple still made time to get to know their new community. Jeff joined a men’s walking group and is on the old-timer’s poker call list. Maggie is in a book club and the local women’s club, and they both take their places at euchre tables whenever they have a chance. Along the way they’ve met descendants of the Farrants, Days, Warneses and others, folks who have come forward with stories and even donations including silver serving pieces and a Bible once used in the inn by keepers William and Ezilda Farrant, and a wicker rocker that had belonged to DH and Eva Farrant Day.
But most helpful of all were the hundred or so volunteers who came out to do everything from teach Maggie how to glaze glass to planting sod, efforts that filled in the last gap in funding. Because they were able to complete the project with hundreds of donated volunteer labor hours and with generous help from their former Genesee County subcontractors, the project is wrapping up at just over $1.7 million, Maggie says.
Photo by Allison Jarrell Acosta
This summer, the Katos welcomed guests to the inn’s eight newly refurbished rooms, each with an ensuite bath. From top to bottom, Maggie’s selections of furnishings, wall color (a soft sage), light fixtures and wallpaper echo the Craftsman period when the inn was an elegant frontier outpost. It isn’t hard to imagine DH Day sweeping in from a day conquering the Northwoods to head up to his room with its expansive view that included both the village and Sleeping Bear Bay.
Just as with past innkeepers, the Katos have put their own imprint on the inn. They’ve named the rooms playfully, from Day Dreaming (the room that is believed to be where Day stayed) to Sleeping Bare, and Maggie decorates the two carved bears they’ve installed on either side of the porch steps with tinsel crowns—shamrocks for St. Patty’s Day, stars for the Fourth, and so on.
And once again, just as in Nellie Day’s time, the aroma of pancakes floats out from the kitchen—only now griddled on a sparkling new Wolf range. Maggie loves to cook, so everything, including the pancakes, are her own recipes (spoiler alert for fall guests: expect her killer pumpkin pancakes in-season). Personal tweaks, certainly, but the inn’s timeless vibe continues under the Katos’ tenure, and it all begins with the view that sweeps past the scraggly, bent white pines, over the bay to the Manitou Islands. That stunner of a panorama has kept folks wanting to cook, clean, sleep, vacation, eat—whatever it takes to be in this magic building—for more than 165 years and counting.