Nature has our backs. Let’s return the favor.
Our public preserves remain free and open from dawn to dusk – and your support helps keep them that way!
Wau-Ke-Na, William Erby Smith Preserve – North Tract
Ganges Township • Allegan County • 130 acres
A lovely walk through coastal habitats rewards visitors with an intimate, natural Lake Michigan beach.
130 acres
Ganges Township
Allegan County
A lovely walk through coastal habitats rewards visitors with an intimate, natural Lake Michigan beach.
Quick facts
Click to quickly jump to . . .
• Maps
• Getting there
• Natural features & conservation
• Preserve history
• Photo gallery
Parking
Gravel lot
8 car capacity
If the lot is full, please come back another time. Roadside parking is illegal and violators may be ticketed by the county sheriff’s department.
Trails
Length: 0.5 mile
A flat, packed-dirt trail takes visitors from the parking area through old-field habitat, past a new tree planting, into shady coastal woods. Turning to the right at the marked intersection in the woods, the trail continues a short distance to bluffs that offer scenic views of Lake Michigan. Turning to the left, the trail continues just a bit further to a steep path down to a small, natural beach.
The path down to the beach is very steep and may be difficult to navigate due to repeated erosion of the soft, sandy soil.
Dogs
Dogs are welcome but must be kept on a 6-foot leash at all times. Dog waste must be packed out. Click to learn more.
Restrooms
None
Recreation
Fall color, fishing, hiking, paddling, scenic views, snowshoeing, spring wildflowers, swimming, wildlife viewing.
Maps
Track your progress in real time as you hike through the preserve with the interactive Avenza Maps App (available on iOS and Android for free)!
1. Add the Avenza Maps App to your phone.
2. Open the PDF of the Wau-Ke-Na North Tract Map.
3. Copy the URL at the top of the page.
4. In the Avenza Maps app, click the ‘plus’ (+) symbol at the top of the page. Then choose ‘Tap to enter a URL of a map.’
5. Paste the copied URL and the trail map will automatically load into the app.
6. Take a hike!
Prefer to have a paper map?
Click on the map image for a PDF that you can print or leave open on your phone while you hike.
Getting there
Natural features
The North Tract features a variety of habitats, including Lake Michigan beach shoreline, clay bluff seeps (the only Grade A example documented in Michigan), oak-hickory forest, beech-maple-hemlock forest, pine plantation, old field, pond, and buttonbush swamp.
Wau-Ke-Na gets its name from the rich forest along the shores of Lake Michigan that makes up the northern tract of the preserve. These woods are home to magnificent specimens of red oak, tulip tree, yellow birch, American beech, sugar maple, hemlock, sassafras, and more. They provide good habitat for migratory songbirds and raptors, and are home to several state-listed plants.
Wau-Ke-Na is a special place for wildlife. Efforts are underway to enhance and expand the beech-maple forest by transitioning the pine plantations to hardwoods, providing better food and shelter for wildlife.
In 2020, Southwest Michigan Land Conservancy and four regional partners received grant funds from the Wildlife Conservation Society’s Climate Adaptation Fund – which is generously supported by the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation – to improve damaged forests and explore proactive approaches amidst the many challenges forests face, including climate change.
“A destructive invasive insect, the hemlock woolly adelgid (HWA), has been recently located in west Michigan just north of Wau-Ke-Na – and has proven its potential impact by devastating beautiful stand of hemlocks in the Appalachians where it is firmly established. Our local hemlocks are usually found further north but enjoy the cool microclimate of the Lake Michigan shoreline in this area. Our local hemlocks are not only stressed by this pest but also by increasingly warmer summer temperatures. By conducting preventative tree injections at Wau-Ke-Na, and working with private owners around Pier Cove, we hope to eliminate infestations and prevent further spread.”
— Mitch Lettow, SWMLC Stewardship Director
Nature has our backs. Let’s return the favor.
Our public preserves remain free and open from dawn to dusk – and your support helps keep them that way!
History
The Story of Wau-Ke-Na, William Erby Smith Preserve
A Circle Unbroken: The Land and Legacy of William Erby Smith
Tom Springer | First published in Landscapes, Winter 2006
In his sphere of business, the late William Erby “Bill” Smith of Chicago left an impressive legacy. In 1949, he co-founded SmithBucklin Corp., the world’s largest association management company, whose 585 employees now serve 150 trade associations. He was a confidante of Orville Redenbacher (Bill’s firm helped establish the Popcorn Institute). He worked with three Chicago mayors as a lifetime board member of the Chicago Convention & Tourism Council.
Even so, to really understand Bill Smith’s character, it’s useful to examine a more humble monument: his driveway. Specifically, the ribbon of packed gravel that winds artfully through the woods to his home on the Lake Michigan shore.
Phil Willson, a SWMLC board member, was Bill’s friend and neighbor for 30 years. On a fall afternoon, he reminisced about Bill while easing his Buick sedan around the massive maples that loom just inches from the driveway’s edge: “Isn’t this something? It reminds me of a game trail as much as anything. Bill didn’t like straight roads – he thought they should go around trees instead of through them.”
Photo gallery
History
continued
A Circle Unbroken: The Land and Legacy of William Erby Smith
Tom Springer | First published in Landscapes, Winter 2006
Bill loved to don his old clothes and do grunt work on his beloved driveway. Yet it wasn’t something he had to do. Given his means, Bill need not have lifted anything heavier than a wine glass during his days at the Lake. But that wasn’t his way. For 50 years, it was hard labor – with hammers, saws, shovels and axes – that brought relief from the relentless pressures of his thriving business.
There was more at stake here, however, than a stressed-out executive’s desire to improve his property. What drove Bill Smith was a motivation far nobler than that: he wanted nothing less than to reclaim a lost paradise.
For better and for worse, Bill was following a family tradition. In 1910, his father was one of Chicago’s most successful real estate brokers. So successful, in fact, that he had a nervous breakdown. “You need to find a vacation place in the country,” his father’s doctor warned him, “or else the city is going to kill you.”
Heeding this advice, the Smith family bought 20 acres and a drafty, clapboard house on Lake Michigan a few miles west of Glenn. There were no good roads then, so the Smith’s took a steamship from Chicago to Port Cove, near South Haven. From there, they’d take a horse-drawn wagon to their summer sanctuary. As Bill’s younger brother Mark remembers, it was a splendid adventure.
“The house wasn’t much. We had kerosene lamps, pitcher pumps and an outhouse. But we loved it. My mother was very interested in nature, and taught us about trees and wildflowers. My father was an expert on mushrooms and rode his horse along the beach.”
Those summers by the Big Lake must have seemed endless, as only they can be for children. The warm sand and lapping surf, the eternally starry nights, the stately beeches and shy trilliums in the cool woods – daily exposure to such wonders gave the Smith boys a deep and abiding love for wild Michigan.
But the spell was broken by the Great Depression. Sometime during the 1930s – Mark Smith can’t recall exactly how or when – the family had to forfeit their summer getaway. They rented their Lake house out for a time, but it burnt down and was never rebuilt.
During World War II, Bill served in the Army Air Corps (Mark was too young to enlist). Like so many of the Greatest Generation, Bill’s post-War years were a blur of industrious enterprise. He was a bright, ambitious young guy with a career to build. If he set aside his boyhood dream to recover the lost vacation property, who could blame him?
Except that Bill Smith didn’t forget. By the late 1940s, he’d reclaimed the family’s holdings — and then some. And there was nothing subtle about his approach. “He’d knock on doors, sit at the kitchen table, and offer to pay farmers cash for their property,” Mark said. “Bill liked to say that ‘his checkbook was the best salesman.’”
In the years that followed, Bill and Mark had the time of their life. They built another drafty lakeside house together, undaunted by the fact that neither had carpentry experience. (Mark recalls heading back to Chicago on Sunday night “covered with Band Aids.”) They threw wild New Year’s Eve parties that became locally infamous. They’d borrow a team of Belgian horses to take moonlight sleigh rides that “were absolutely magnificent.” They planted thousands of trees, so many that both lost count. Through it all, Mark says, they were as close as only the best brothers can be.
In time, Bill assembled a 540-acre parcel. It includes wetlands, forest, a restored prairie and a quarter mile of undeveloped Lake Michigan waterfront, topped by a dramatic wooded bluff. Bill named his preserve Wau-Ke-Na, which means “forest by the water.” And the generosity didn’t stop at his driveway. It extended to the village of Glenn, where Bill’s donations have restored a fire station, museum, church and office building.
Yet in the end, Bill wanted nothing more than to give his land away. Provided, of course, that it would never be developed. For years, Bill had kept close tabs on SWMLC. He’d followed its growth through Phil Willson, and in 2002, Bill donated to SWMLC a 130-acre conservation easement. Before Bill’s death in 2004, at age 90, he arranged for SWMLC to manage his remaining Wau-Ke-Na property.
Bill was buried in Ganges Township’s Plummerville Cemetery, alongside Allegan County pioneers and Civil War veterans. The old graveyard’s not far from Bill’s beloved driveway-through-the woods.
Then in 2004, Mark decided to forever close the circle. After cutting through miles of red tape, he had the graves of his mother and father exhumed in Chicago and re-buried next to Bill. “It something that Bill and I talked about,” Mark said. “We decided our family should be here by the Lake again – together.”
William Erby Smith loved the land and his 2005 bequest of Wau-Ke-Na (“forest-by-the-water”) is the largest of Southwest Michigan Land Conservancy’s preserves.
Upon his death in 2004 at age 90, the Chicago Tribune printed an obituary which contained the following passages:
“He was a great conservationist and he put together a tremendous wildlife sanctuary in southwest Michigan,” Mark Smith said.
“He loved the land. He was a man of the earth,” said his brother. In 2002, Mark Smith said, the town of Glenn, Mich., honored Mr. Smith for helping to conserve 130 acres of Lake Michigan shoreline and 250 acres of prairie and farmland. Mr. Smith also “rebuilt the whole town,” he said, using his woodworking skills to restore buildings, including the town’s first fire station.
Read the entire Chicago Tribune obituary by Courtney Wade.