VICKSBURG — Their options are dwindling along with their hopes.
“Every time I come out here, it might be the last time,” said 38-year-old Chad Heeter, standing outside the family getaway he's known all his life. “Right now, it feels like we're not going to win. It’s sad.”
His extended family owns an old cottage on a bluff overlooking a lake in southern Michigan, just outside Kalamazoo. It’s where generations of family members have gathered to catch up, go swimming, talk by the fire pit, let the kids run around.
“We had weddings here, we had engagements here, we had showers here,” said 67-year-old Jayne Engels of Portage, a member of one of the two related families that owns it. “This is where we came to grieve for my mom and dad when they died.
We came here to grieve all together. It's just so special.”
It's a beautiful location. Yet suddenly it's the worst place it could be.
Prairie View Public Park in Vicksburg consists of 210 acres of hiking trails, picnic shelters, playgrounds, beaches and volleyball courts. In recent years, the county has let much of it return to its natural state of woodland and prairie, and now it’s home to deer, owls, butterflies and turtles, plus two lakes that offer public fishing.
But at its northwestern edge, on a third of an acre, sits this old cottage. And the county now wants it to become part of the park.
Four years ago, Kalamazoo County offered the family what it said was market value for the cottage and the land. The family declined to sell it. So the county took them to court to get it by force.
In Michigan, current eminent domain laws allows local or state governments to take private property if there’s a clear public purpose — even if the owner refuses to sell — as long as they are paid fair compensation. Historically, "public purpose" has referred to projects such as roads, schools and bridges. And in many cases, "public necessity" had to be shown as well in order to seize a particular property.
Three years ago, the Kalamazoo County Circuit Court sided with the county’s plan to use eminent domain to force the owners of the cottage to leave. Just last month, so did the Michigan Court of Appeals.
Now, the family has to decide whether to appeal to the Michigan Supreme Court. It's their final resort. If they don't, they have to leave their property by the end of November.
Despite the odds against them, they don't want to quit.
“We will never give up, because we're fighting for your property rights too, and not being railroaded by the government,” said 63-year-old Anne-Marie Henegar, one of the descendants of the original owners. “And that's exactly what’s happening.”
***
The cottage was there first.
In 1949, Harry Johnson and his wife Helen built a couple of cabins on their rural land overlooking Gourdneck Lake in Kalamazoo County, just south of Portage, which they shared with four other couples in the family. Their neighbors had similarly modest plots that served as summer getaways.
As the families grew, they needed more space for everyone to gather, so they tore down the smaller structures and built a bigger cottage in 1962, a cinder-block Mid-Century Modern split level that reflects the basic amenities of its time.
A year later, the county began buying up parcels around it to create a new park. One by one, the owners of those plots sold. Everyone except the families that owned this cottage.
At first, the county threatened to condemn the property. But rather than engage in a long legal battle, the two sides came to a written agreement in 1963.
It allowed the families to keep their cottage, absolved the county of any liability from anything that happens to the family or their property by visitors to the park or through negligence by park employees, and it gave the families 10 keys to the park gates so they could get in after hours and take a service road to their cottage, which lies about a mile away from the entrance.
One notable clause said that if the family ever chose to sell, the county would have the first right of refusal to buy. That paragraph would later become a point of contention.
The agreement was a prime example of inholding, a situation in which private land is encompassed by a national or state park or other similarly publicly owned area, and allowed to remain. There are a number of similar examples in Michigan, including five homes and a cottage inside Saugatuck Dunes State Park, a bar located on private land inside Tahquamenon Falls State Park and several small parcels of private land within Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore. The arrangement isn’t common, but it has precedent.
For more than six decades, the agreement between the family and the county held.
“We’ve always been a good steward,” said Larry McClish, 71, who's married to one of the descendants of the original owners. “We've always been friendly with the park. We've paid property taxes. We've never had any issues.”
In 2019, the last of the original owners died. Not long afterward, the county began efforts to acquire the land.
But the cottage had been passed down to descendants of two of the five original families, the Talandas and the Johnsons, which now numbered dozens of children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren. And they wanted to keep the property.
County officials said that the agreement expired with the death of the original owners who signed the agreement, asserting that the property defaults to the county through a sale, although no such phrasing exists in the document.
But the county focused on one clause that states “the parties of the second part (the families) agree that they will not rent or assign their said premises to any person or persons who are not parties of the second part.”
The families asserted that descendants of the original families count as parties to the agreement since they are part of the same families. But the county claimed that inheritance of the property by them counted as "assigning" the property, and was therefore a breach of the agreement.
In April 2022, during a meeting in which supporters of the family packed the room and held up signs reading “Save the Cottage,” the Kalamazoo County Board of Commissioners voted 8-3 to condemn the property and offer the family $320,000, which it said was market value. The family refused the offer.
“We don't want the money,” Engels said. “We kept telling the commissioners that we want this place. You can't replace this. We're all retired except one of us. And we've used up a lot of our retirement, never expecting this fight. So no, I don't want the money. I just want this place.”
The county then sued the family in Kalamazoo County Circuit Court, which ruled in August 2023 that the park could take the property using eminent domain.
“Prairie View Park is owned by the county and is open to the public, and the purpose of the proposed taking is to complete Prairie View Park, and thus far the proposed taking is unquestionably for a public use,” wrote Judge Curtis Bell in his ruling.
County officials refused to comment on the reason for the sudden effort to take the property after six decades of coexistence, or its plans for the property, or the legal costs that the county has incurred so far, although local news reports from two years ago pegged the county's legal bills at more than $180,000 between 2019 and 2024.
“As we've shared previously, the County did not make this decision lightly. Our position has been rooted in completing Prairie View County Park, serving the public interest, protecting the natural environment of Prairie View County Park, and addressing the safety and liability considerations associated with private property located within a public park,” Kalamazoo County spokeswoman Taylor Koopman said in a written statement.
“We also recognize the family's longstanding connection to the property and understand its personal significance to those involved.”
The family appealed the circuit court ruling, arguing that since the county had no stated plan for the property, it couldn’t argue that there was a public necessity for it.
They cited comments made by Parks Director David Rachowicz during a March 1, 2022 County Board of Commissioners meeting, when he told its members that “we do not have specific plans for that one-third of an acre at this point other than incorporating it into the rest of the park.”
But the Court of Appeals ruled last month in favor of the county, upholding the lower court finding that simply making the park whole by adding the family's third of an acre to the 210 acres of the park was an adequate enough plan in itself.
That leaves the Michigan Supreme Court as the family’s last avenue. And after spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on legal bills, they have to decide whether they can afford to carry on the fight.
“We're not unreasonable people,” said Joyce McClish, 68, a descendant of the original owners. “If they needed the property for something of value or use, we would understand that. But just to make a walking path 50 more feet, that’s not a reason that makes sense to us.”
***
The cottage is spartan. There’s a main room on the ground floor with a kitchen and a kid-friendly linoleum floor, while the upper level has four rooms furnished with a few beds and couches. There’s no air conditioning, no cable or satellite television, no Wi-fi. One room is dedicated to playing board games. Little has changed in six decades.
It sits at the top of a steep, mossy bluff that slopes down to the shoreline, which faces a western sky of summer sunsets. There are woods on all sides of the property. A small dock leads into the water. A firepit of stacked fieldstone sits atop the ridge. A spiral stairway of weathered wood steps twirls its way up to the cottage.
Two of its steps were fresh boards. “We just had to replace those this year,” said Joyce McClish. “But things like that are on hold. We spent 10 years of this and, like, do we want to put money into this if the end result is they come and demolish it?”
Several members of the families had gathered here on a Friday afternoon before attending a small-town football game at a nearby high school. They sat at the picnic tables out back and enjoyed apple cider and donuts as they looked over old photographs: grandpa at the cottage in the early days, dozens of kids assembled out back years ago, time-faded photos of long-deceased family members sitting right here.
The autumn sun sank into the trees and cast soft yellow beams into the water, and over the beach, and onto their cottage. The beauty of it all just made the mood among them subdued and melancholy. For all those years, this was where the families came together. And now, instead of enjoying evenings like this, they had to wonder each time if it would be their last.
“I feel like it's evil, trying to take away something very good by using whatever they can use to get us out of here without giving us reasons for taking a family cottage,” said 83-year-old Janet Laurin-Knudsen of Portage, the oldest surviving daughter of one of the last surviving couples.
“If it was for a highway or a hospital, but it’s for nothing. It’s everything to us, and now they want it for nothing. But we've done all we can do. It's in God’s hands now.”
John Carlisle writes about Michigan. His stories can be found at freep.com/carlisle. Contact him: jcarlisle@freepress.com. Follow him on Twitter @_johncarlisle, Facebook at johncarlisle.freep or on Instagram at johncarlislefreep.
This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: Michigan county sues to seize family’s cottage
