Grand Rapids and Indiana Railroad Station

corner of Bay and Lewis Streets, Petoskey. (currently Pennsylvania Plaza Office Complex)

This station, built in 1899, served as the region’s transportation hub. The Hemingway family passed through the station when going from Harbor Springs to their Walloon Lake cottage. Hemingway himself used the station when travelling north from his family’s Oak Park, Illinois, home. It is the likely model for the train station in his novel, The Torrents of Spring, a parody set in the Petoskey area.

In addition to long haul trains that brought people from far away locations, this station, and a seasonal suburban (“dummy”) train station served as a local transportation hub. People would transfer from the long haul train to the dummy trains that ran to Walloon Lake and numerous other locations around Little Traverse Bay.

Once at the locations, summer residents used the dummy train for transportation back into and through Petoskey to shop or visit other regional friends.

Referring to itself as “The Fishing Line,” the Grand Rapids and Indiana Railroad Company aggressively marketed northern Michigan in self-published tourist booklets and in newspapers throughout the Midwest.

Grand Rapids and Indiana Railroad Station