Harbor Springs Named America’s Best Small Lake Town

Story by By Leilani Marie Labong Travel + Leisure Editorial Guidelines Published on September 5, 2024

Lake in Harbor Springs, Michigan. Photo: Courtesy of Petoskey Area Visitors Bureau

America’s Best Small Lake Town Has Dazzling Waters, Uncrowded Beaches, and a 20-mile-long Tunnel of Trees

With the stylish renovation of a beloved roadside lodge, modern travelers are newly discovering historic Harbor Springs, a shoreline utopia on Lake Michigan that generations of Midwesterners have tried to keep a secret.

Located on Lake Michigan’s Little Traverse Bay — at the far-flung “tip of the mitt” — Harbor Springs has been a resort destination, mostly for Midwesterners, since the 1850s. Come Memorial Day weekend, the population of this quintessential American lake community — imagine sherbet-hued cruiser bikes, moored boats bobbing in a turquoise harbor, and 19th-century storefronts bedecked in tufts of patriotic bunting — swells to about five times its year-round population of 1,270 people. Considering Harbor Springs’ tiny geography of just 1.3 square miles, the sudden surge might sound like a swarm, were most of them not recreationally dispersed over land and lake, on boats and beaches and backroads beyond the town boundaries.

“An intentional lack of sprawl maintains the quaint feel and preserves the diversity and beauty of our natural surroundings,” says Tobin MacCready, a second-generation local shop owner. Indeed, nary a fast-food chain nor big-box store mars this historic postcard idyll.

The stylish addition of a newly refurbished former roadside lodge now called Otis, co-owned by a fourth-generation Harbor Springs sojourner, brings an energizing infusion of first-timers to the town. Once a bustling port for lumber and fur trading (and even bootlegging and gambling, most famously at the long-shuttered Club Manitou, a rumored haunt for mobsters from the 1930s to 50s), the generations of Midwestern families that have vacationed in Harbor Springs include some of the biggest names in American industry, like Bissel, Gamble, and Ford. Among the town’s most beautiful sites are the families’ vintage lakefront “cottages,” late 19th-century architectural confections the rest of us would call mansions.

“What I love about Harbor Springs is that its history is so intertwined with industry and manufacturing,” says Daniel Caudill, creative and brand consultant for Otis. “It’s a town that came to be when America was coming into its own.”

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