St. Joseph's Silver Beach Carousel was once part of an amusement park

Editor's Note: This story was published in May 2022.

ST. JOSEPH — If you've ridden the Silver Beach Carousel in St. Joseph, you've ridden a significant piece of Michigan history; and you probably didn't know it.

The Silver Beach Carousel, as tourists know it today, began serving visitors in January 2010 — but the story actually starts over a century earlier, with Louis Wallace, Logan Drake and Silver Beach Amusement Park.

"Wallace and Drake started with a boating company," said television producer Paul Wasowski. "They were building canoes and sailboats in the late 1800s and early 1900s, and they started spreading their ideas down the beach. It became a realty company and they started building cabins, and then — piece by piece — they built the amusement park."

Wasowski, an executive producer and production manager at WNIT — a PBS affiliate broadcasting to communities in Indiana and southwest Michigan — has been waiting decades to tell this story.

"It's been a 50-some-year journey," he said. "My parents took me when I was five or six. It just made a real impact on me. I remember the rollercoaster, the Ferris wheel, all the things I was too little to ride. It was just a fun park for families.

"I'm really big into water, so I go to Silver Beach almost every weekend in the summer, and I started thinking about this project before I even got into a PBS station or started making documentaries. I thought it would be a cool story to tell."

"It's a neat place, and a lot of people didn't even know it existed," Wasowski added. "There aren't a lot of signs — it was all torn down."

From riverboats to roller coasters

The amusement park, according to local lore, began when Wallace and Drake launched riverboats, which provided scenic tours from St. Joseph to Berrien Springs. Each seated 60-100 people, and boxed lunches and souvenirs were available from Drake's restaurant and souvenir factory.

But the beach needed something more, so the duo invited local vendors to sell their wares, ranging from swimmings caps to lemonade. Then came carnival games and a photography studio for portrait-taking.

Not long after, structures cropped up — an ice cream parlor, a souvenir shop, a pavilion. Four years before the turn of the century, Silver Beach Amusement Park was thriving.

According to Wasowski, the first flight took place at Silver Beach — predating the Wright Brothers' flight in Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, by several years.

"But because the gentleman who did the flight didn't have the proper controls, he didn't get credit for it," Wasowski said.

Between 1896 and 1913, three wooden buildings and a boardwalk were constructed. Visitors could enjoy a rollercoaster, an open-ended roller skating rink (believed to be the first in the area), a pipe organ, a penny arcade, a house of mysteries, concession stands and a large dance pavilion and casino. Crowds came from all over Michigan, as well as Wisconsin and Illinois.

Adults could enjoy an airplane ride, with six airplanes suspended on steel cables, while a team of dogs pulled children in miniature carriages around a turnstile. While, at first, the park's boardwalk was often covered by lapping waves, an ever-growing beach meant more than 50 yards separated the two by the 1920s.

The history of the famous carousel

The carousel began its reign at Silver Beach in 1916, with hand-carved horses, jeweled saddles and real horsehair tails. The ride had three rows with 44 horses. Originally, there were no jumpers, but the carousel was sent back and given 16 jumpers in the 1920s.

"The one we have today isn't the original," Wasowski said. "When the park was going downhill, they sold the carousel to someone in New Mexico. They eventually tried to buy it back, but at that point, the woman had sold the original carousel to a company in Washington. Instead, they got the community together and raised money to have the carousel rebuilt. It's just fabulous and fascinating what they did with it."

The Shadowland Ballroom was built in 1927. For years, ballroom dances were held every night, and it wasn't uncommon to see over a thousand dancers in a single evening. But World War II slowed the pace of both Shadowland and Silver Beach Amusement Park.

Other rides built over the years included a revolving barrel, a giant caterpillar that ran along a circular track, bumper cars and a "whip" of several coaches that rolled along an oval track and whipped around turns at high speeds — plus the notable Ferris wheel and a miniature diesel train.

The winds of change

Wallace died in July 1945. Drake followed two years later. The lifelong friends were buried in the same section of St. Joseph's Lakeview Cemetery, just 15 feet apart. Drake's daughter, Roberta, and her husband, Horace Terrill, took over operations at Silver Beach.

While the park stayed busy through the 1950s — with the addition of Kiddieland, a miniature golf course and several new rides — things began to change during the 1960s.

"The period this park was open, with everything from the Great Depression to World War I and World War II, think about how much the world has changed since then," Wasowski said. "If you start thinking about the time period, Disney World was starting to happen, Cedar Point was opening up. Silver Beach just couldn't compete with these big rides and mega parks, so people stopped going.

"There was some violence down there. The police were called quite a bit. People from Chicago and Gary were pickpocketing and robbing, and it just became too expensive to keep it going. Television was coming into play, malls were opening up, people had an opportunity to do more. When they wanted to go to an amusement park, they went to one of the mega parks. Silver Beach just kind of faded away."

One incident, in particular, disturbed locals — when a group of 40 or 50 teenagers attempted to jump on a rollercoaster without paying. When a security guard tried to stop them, he was struck from behind and his revolver was stolen. The teenagers struck the ticket-taker, stole $125 and countless tickets and fled.

By 1972, despite attempts at a comeback, ownership was forced to close the park for good.

"They sold off almost everything they could," Wasowski said. "They burned down the rollercoaster, which was sad to see. They sold off the metal as scrap. But it's unbelievable how beautiful Silver Beach is now.

"If you were to just go down on the beach and tell someone there used to be an amusement park there, they wouldn't believe you. But a lot of people said it was the best thing in their lives."

The Shadowland Ballroom has been reconstructed in honor of the park.

"That and the carousel are really the only remnants you can see from the original park," Wasowski said. "I just remember how fun Silver Beach Amusement Park was. Of any documentary I've ever worked on, this one is a labor of love."

— Photos and information for this story were collected from WNIT, the Southwest Michigan Business and Tourism Directory and the official website for Silver Beach Carousel. Cassandra Lybrink is the local editor of The Holland Sentinel. Contact her at clybrink@hollandsentinel.com. Follow her on Twitter @CassLybrink.

This article originally appeared on The Holland Sentinel: St. Joseph's Silver Beach Carousel was once part of an amusement park