Article
ANDERCOOK LAKE, MI - It's still a bit early in the season, but it was about this time of year a century or so ago that people in and around Jackson started thinking about a veritable oasis south of town.
Hague Park welcomed thousands to Vandercook Lake on warm-weather days in the early 20th century. Their squeals filled the air as they plummeted down a giant toboggan slide into the water or flew through the air on a rollercoaster at the amusement park that was once one of the happiest places to be.
"It was just such a nice place to go," Dollie Martin recalled in a 1971 Citizen Patriot article. "Just clean fun."
Hague Park helped make Vandercook Lake the hottest summer resort Jackson County had ever seen at the time. And it all began in the 1890s when a farmer named Edrick Hague developed a picnic spot on land he owned near the water.
The nice lake and its proximity to Jackson caught the attention of three savvy businessmen known as the "Pittsburgh Millionaires." They leased 110 acres from Hague and one of them, James Albert O'Dell, moved here to manage it.
The group eventually bought the land outright and developed the amusement park on the east side of the lake that still brings smiles to the faces of those who remember it and spurs curiosity among those too young to have seen it.
They named it Hague Park and started adding on. There was a vaudeville theater in1907, and then a dance hall, bowling alley, shooting gallery, rental boats, carousel, roller rink, balloon ascensions, ballgames, concessions and a steamboat that offered rides around the lake that all came over time.
Perhaps the most memorable of all attractions was the "Jack Rabbit," a figure-8 roller coaster.
"I graduated from Vandercook Lake High School in 1940 and that old Jack Rabbit coaster was still there then," said Roberta Bowser, 89, of Jackson. "It wasn't running. It was mostly a relic then."
Peek Through Time
The late Allen "Mike" Harris of Jackson remembered its heyday in "Marching Through Nostalgia," a book of personal history he published in 1987 at age 81.
"When I think of Vandercook Lake, I think of the Jack Rabbit or the first time I ever rode on it," Harris wrote. "The ride consisted of four separate cars mounted on the roller-coaster track. After you entered and sat down, they put a bar across your lap so you wouldn't fall out. When you took off, you went almost straight up for about 50 feet. And then all of a sudden you took a downward plunge and the world dropped out from under you. I think I passed out after that first drop and when I started to come to, the trees were going by at a high rate of speed. My cousin led me off the thing when it stopped and I was as white as a sheet."
At the peak of its popularity from about 1910-20, it was not uncommon to see 20,000 or more people at Hague Park on summer weekends. The Citizen Patriot reported the sale of 250 gallons of ice cream in one day at one ice cream stand.
Hague Park also was also where countless young lovers met. Among them were Bowser's parents, Nancy and Mehrley McLouth.
"My father had just come home from service in World War I and was working at the bowling alley," Bowser said. "My mother was working in the bath house where they rented out bathing suits. They were married in 1920."
The park's downfall started with a fire in 1923 that was suspected, but never proven, to be arson. It hit the pump house that was installed to protect against fires first. Jackson firefighters couldn't help because city leaders forbade them from fighting fires outside the city limits.
Without much water to fight the fire, seven buildings were destroyed in less than an hour. Insurance that covered them had expired six months earlier. The burned structures were never rebuilt, but the rides and concessions spared continued on.
The father-and-son team of Eugene and Edmund Bethel from Columbus, Ohio, bought the park in 1926. They made some improvements and changed the name to Lakeview Park but by then, the glory days were fading fast.
The Great Depression devastated business and the amusement park closed and the land became a county park in 1938. Nearly 75 years later, a concrete pad at Vandercook Lake County Park is all that's left of Hague Park. It was a footing for the Jack Rabbit.
Tidbits
* Before developing into a resort for city-dwellers, the shores of Vandercook Lake were populated by farmers. One of them, Henry Vandercook, a transplanted New Yorker who was one of Jackson's earliest white settlers, gave the Summit Township lake and unincorporated town nearby its name. A millwright, Vandercook came to Jackson about 1836 and eventually made a nice fortune in industry and real estate.
* Most people paid 5 cents and hopped an open-sided streetcar at a depot on the north side of Main Street, now Michigan Avenue, between Francis and Mechanic streets, to get to Hague Park. The car took Francis Street to the park, turned around and went back. Twenty-three cars operated on this line alone on busy weekends, servicing each stop every three minutes. "The 4th of July crowd in 1924 was the largest I can remember," Harry Evans, a onetime operator of the Vandercook Lake street car, said in a 1971 Citizen Patriot article.
* In another 1971, Citizen Patriot article, Maurice DeCamp of Rives Junction remembered having his first ice-cream cone at Hague Park. He recalled standing next to the shooting gallery, watching batter for the cone being poured on a hot griddle.
* "Galloping" Oscar Gallup, an aviator who performed aerial shows over Hague Park, crashed shortly after take-off from the park on July 30, 1924. It was Jackson County's first recorded airplane disaster. Gallup and his passenger, Russell Vreeland of Jackson, were injured but survived. They were treated at the office of Dr. James W. Townsend at 110 Hague St.
* Jeannie Wilson was a Jackson teenager who rode the Jack Rabbit rollercoaster by standing on her head on the seat. She got a good scolding from the men running the ride the first time she did it, but that didn't stop her. The ride's operators finally gave up reprimanding her when they saw the crowd her stunt drew. They told her she could ride the coaster free anytime she wanted.
* Rumors said the old Hague Park steamboat, the R.E. Emmons, was buried at the bottom of Vandercook Lake. In the 1970s, Blackman Township's Dennis L. Walchak searched for it to no avail. A 1977 Citizen Patriot story about his quest revealed the boat was never sunk in the lake, but rather was sold for salvage when park owners Eugene and Edmund Bethel fell on hard times. The scrap lumber was used in a house at 517 Cass Ave., as well as to build docks and porches for some lakefront dwellings.