At Hoeft State Park, you can stay – in comfort – in a 1920s-era cottage the state purchased from a Sears, Roebuck and Co. catalog.
A vestige of the retailer’s mail-order home business, the cottage resembles a VRBO more than a camp cabin and offers visitors a chance to enjoy the Northern Michigan park’s Lake Huron beaches year-round with neither the expense of owning an RV nor the hardships of tents, air mattresses and meals over a campfire.
Randy Brown, unit supervisor at the 340-acre park outside Rogers City, says the lodge is a popular destination all year round; in the summer, the park’s mile of sandy Lake Huron beach beckons, and in the winter, cross country skiers hit the trails.
“You know, we’re in an area where cross country skiing, snowmobiling and all that good stuff is (available) in the area,” Brown says.
Hot showers, electric lights, and comfortable furniture don’t detract a bit from the vintage feel of the cabin, which was intended for staff housing and built by park rangers and the
Civilian Conservation Corps nearly 100 years ago.
The solid wood furnishings were built by the
Michigan Prison Build program at the Thumb Correctional Facility in Lapeer, Brown says. Picture frames and floor lamps carry the theme of Petoskey stones and pinecones.
A placard situated on an end table stacked with travel brochures explains the house design started out in 1929 as the
The Rodessa. The house requires only a 28-foot lot and is one of the company's most popular models. The Rodessa initially featured a gabled front porch. The porch disappeared with the park's expansion of the house to potentially shelter two rangers and their families. A park supervisor occupied the home until 2006.
The Hoeft State Park cottage is believed to be the only Sears, Roebuck and Co. kit house in the Michigan’s state park system’s inventory of housing, says Robbert McKay, an historical architect for the Parks and Recreation Division of the Michigan Department of Natural Resources. It’s possible, he adds, there were other kit homes in the system, but housing has been regularly improved over the years or was replaced to provide quality housing to onsite park staff.
About the cottage
The two-story dwelling accommodates eight easily. Three bedrooms are outfitted with queen-size beds, and one of the two upstairs rooms has bunk beds, too. The house features a full bathroom on the main floor and a half bath on the second; two futons, tables, lamps and an Adirondack chair furnish the living room.
A full kitchen is outfitted with refrigerator and freezer, electric stove, microwave, coffee maker, toaster, dishes and cookware; the dining room has a large table and six chairs; the shelf in the living room’s ample closet is stocked with a full collection of board games; the game room has its own five-sided table and chairs, and more Adirondack chairs are situated on the enclosed sun porch.
The kitchen was a popular feature for Elma Rosenberg, an Otsego resident who stayed at the cabin for several days in October. “It was absolutely delightful. I loved the house. It was comfortable, it was clean, it was convenient, and it was beautiful,” she says, adding she’d return in a heartbeat. “And I just, I thought it was really nice that the kitchen was stocked with dishes and pots and pans and everything.”
It’s BYO camp chair for the covered front and back porches, but there is a charcoal grill, fire pit, two picnic tables and a bench in the lodge’s backyard, which is separated by trees from the rest of the campground.
Guests must provide their own linens and are expected to clean the lodge prior to their departure.
Mail-order home business
Far more than a century ago, Sears, Roebuck and Co., was a popular mail order company, rather like a precursor to Amazon, selling everything from watches and jewelry to toys and bicycles to farming supplies and sporting goods. Sears began selling building materials out of its catalogs in 1895, eventually creating a specialty catalog to sell do-it-yourself home kits.
As many as 75,000 home kits were sold between 1908 and 1940 as part of the company’s Modern Homes program. Customers could choose a house plan to suit their own style and budget. In one month – May 1926 – the Chicago-based retailer sold 324 units.
During that time, “Modern Homes made an indelible mark on the history of American housing. A remarkable degree of variety marks the three-plus decades of house design by Sears,” according to the
Sears Archives. An anonymous group of architects are responsible for most of the 447 different house designs. The designs could be modified, including reversing floor plans, building with brick instead of wood siding, according to the archives.
Ellen Nordin, treasurer of the Friends of Hoeft State Park, says the Sears cottage is a “wonderful addition to the park, and very popular with visitors.”
“You can hardly get in. It's so popular, it's hard to book,” she says, speaking from personal experience. “My own family stayed there one Thanksgiving. We had the best time. I took the turkey and cooked it out there.”
The state park
P.H. Hoeft State Park is one of Michigan’s oldest
state parks, laid out on land donated in 1922 by Paul H. Hoeft, a Rogers City lumberman and elected township official. He donated parcels of land to the state to create the park at around the time the main road through Rogers City was being upgraded into what is now U.S. 23.
The Civilian Conservation Corps work in the park a few years later included creation of foot trails, a gravel road, and a reforestation project.
The Sears cottage, which served as staff housing until it was converted to a tourist rental, is a short walk away from another stunning historical structure built during the same era, the stone picnic shelter.
Sunrise Pavilion, built by the Civilian Conservation Corps in the 1930s, overlooks the shores of Lake Huron and provides a straight shot to the beach, part of the park’s one-mile shoreline.
Although typically open year-round, the lodge is closed this fall and through the winter to allow construction of a major upgrade to the park’s water and sewer lines. Renovations to the campground’s water distribution system, toilet and shower buildings, sanitation station, sewage system and contact station are expected to keep the area closed until at least June.
The lodge itself will not undergo any work, but it is served by the sewer line that will be under construction, Brown says.
The tentative schedule for reopening the lodge and campground is June 16, 2025, dependent on progress of the campground upgrades. For information and reservations, go to
Hoeft State Park.
Rosemary Parker has worked as a writer and editor for more than 40 years. She is a regular contributor to Rural Innovation Exchange and other Issue Media Group publications.