Drive West Burdickville Road through Maple City on any given evening and you will pass three old buildings within about a quarter mile of each other. One is a converted one-room schoolhouse where people are sliding granite stones across a sheet of ice. One is a century-old barn that spent most of this decade wrapped in scaffolding and volunteer labor. And a third, a few miles off, is a barn nobody outside Leelanau County had much reason to think about until this spring, when it picked up the state's top preservation award without a single fundraiser attached to it.
Three buildings, three completely different survival stories. That gap says more about how Maple City actually works than any single one of them does on its own.
Nine Years, One Dollar a Year, and a Long List of Repairs
The Leelanau County Poor Farm Barn sits at 1110 West Burdickville Road, on the edge of Myles Kimmerly Park. It was built in the summer of 1911 by John Schettek for $1,400, designed by architect Jens C. Petersen, who also drew up the schoolhouse in Empire. The barn replaced an earlier structure that burned that April, and it was built to work: a 40-by-60-foot gambrel-roofed bank barn with board-and-batten siding, a poured concrete foundation, four work-horse stalls, nine milking stanchions, and seven hay chutes.
It stood on land the county had purchased in 1901 to run a poor farm, a legal requirement at the time for counties to house residents who couldn't support themselves. The farm operated until 1961, when its remaining residents moved to the newly built Maple Valley Nursing Home next door. The house and outbuildings came down. Only the barn was left standing, and even that was nearly lost. In 2017 the county priced out demolition and got a bid north of $60,000. That was the moment a small group, including barn restoration specialist Steve Stier, stepped in and formed the Leelanau County Historic Preservation Society, negotiating a 25-year lease from the county for one dollar a year in exchange for taking on the fundraising and the repairs themselves.
What followed was slow, visible, community-funded work. Free summer concerts on the lawn, three of them last July and August, drew over 220 people to the first show alone and doubled as fundraisers for the restoration. Volunteers and licensed contractors chipped away at the list: a new east basement wall, electrical service, window repairs, door track replacement. By June 13 of this year, the society had enough finished to host an open house and show it off. New wiring and lighting, a fully resurfaced wood floor, repaired siding, new lower-level doors, and a fresh coat of paint. Nine years after the demolition scare, the barn that almost came down instead got a Michigan Historical Marker in 2021 and a statewide Barn of the Year honor the same year.
"If the barn had been demolished, it would be gone forever, along with the tangible evidence of a social welfare program in Leelanau County," Stier has said of the site.
None of that happened by accident, and none of it happened fast. It happened because a nonprofit board kept showing up to ask for money and volunteer hours, year after year, for the better part of a decade.
A Second Barn, No Nonprofit Required
A short drive from the Poor Farm site sits a different barn with a different owner and a completely different path to recognition. In March, the Michigan Barn Preservation Network held its annual conference and named its 2026 Barn of the Year winners. Alongside barns in the Upper Peninsula, Lenawee County, and Kent County was the Bicentennial Barn in Maple City, owned by Scott and Tamara Stone.
There was no county lease. No dollar-a-year deal. No public concert series to fund the repairs. As far as the public record shows, it was privately kept up by its owners and recognized directly by the Michigan Barn Preservation Network for that work, on its own timeline, with none of the visible campaign the Poor Farm Barn required.
| Poor Farm Barn | Bicentennial Barn | |
|---|---|---|
| Ownership | Leased from Leelanau County | Privately owned by Scott and Tamara Stone |
| How it survived | Nonprofit-led restoration, public fundraising | Private maintenance, no public campaign |
| Recognition | Michigan Historical Marker (2021), Barn of the Year (2021) | Barn of the Year (2026) |
| Public access | Open for tours and community events | Not a public venue |
Two barns, one small village, roughly the same era, and two entirely different reasons they're both still standing in 2026. One needed a community to organize around it. The other just needed an owner willing to keep it up.
The Schoolhouse That Never Had to Be Saved
There's a fourth building in this story, and it never went through a preservation campaign at all, because it never stopped being useful. Broomstack Kitchen & Taphouse operates out of Maple City's old schoolhouse on West Burdickville Road, and it's also home to the Leelanau Curling Club, the only dedicated, temperature-controlled curling facility in northwestern Michigan that runs year-round.
Leagues run Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday nights across Social, Novice, Junior, and Competitive tiers, in sessions that last anywhere from three to ten weeks. If you've never tried it and want to before committing to a league, the club runs regular Learn to Curl sessions, and the gear list is short:
- Clean sneakers with no metal on the soles, carried in rather than worn in
- A base layer and wool socks
- A hat and gloves if you run cold
- No shorts. The ice room sits around 41 degrees, and bare knees will melt the ice
Afterward, or before, there's a menu built around locally sourced ingredients, including a burger made with grass-fed beef from Sugar View Farms and a rotating tap list of Michigan beer, cider, and mead. Nobody had to raise money to keep this building relevant. It found a paying use decades ago and it has been busy every week since, no historical marker required.
The Land That Outlived the Buildings
Even when a structure doesn't survive, the ground underneath it sometimes does. Myles Kimmerly Park, next to the Poor Farm Barn, sits on the actual footprint of the old poor farm's 120 acres. In the 1970s, the Cedar-Maple City Lions Club took that land and turned it into a public recreation area. Today it hosts disc golf, soccer, baseball, hiking, and winter sports, on the same acreage where the county's poor farm once raised crops and cattle to support its residents.
No building had to be saved for this piece of history to keep serving the community. The Lions Club simply repurposed what was already there, and the land has been in continuous public use for over fifty years.
Even the Diner Kept the Name
The lightest form of preservation in Maple City doesn't involve a lease, a nonprofit, or a renovation budget at all. It's a name. When the village was first settled in 1866, it wasn't called Maple City. It was Peg Town, home to a factory that turned maple logs into shoe pegs, the small wooden pins once used to fasten soles to boots before glue and stitching took over. The name held on informally for nearly a decade before the post office made "Maple City" official in 1875.
Pegtown Station, one of the village's restaurants, carries that original name today. No structure had to be rescued and no marker had to be installed. Someone just decided the name was worth keeping.
What Four Old Buildings Add Up To
Maple City is still, at its core, a very small place. Kasson Township's own description of the village lists a post office, a grocery market, a gas station, and two restaurants as the services within its densely settled center. One recent estimate puts the village population under 200 residents. That's the whole stage this is playing out on.
And on that small stage, there isn't one way this village keeps its history intact. There are at least four: a nonprofit board that spends nearly a decade fundraising for a barn nobody else would save, a private owner who keeps a second barn standing without asking anyone for help, a schoolhouse that never needed saving because it never stopped earning its keep, and a park that inherited land after the buildings on it were already gone. None of these strategies looked at the other and copied it. Each one just fit whatever building, or land, or name, needed it.
That's a strange amount of institutional memory for a village this size to be carrying around, and it isn't slowing down. The barn's open house was in June. The Barn of the Year announcement was in March. The curling leagues start back up again this fall. Whatever comes next in Maple City, it will probably show up quietly, on a road most people only drive through on the way to somewhere else.
If you're already living in Maple City, you've probably passed all four of these places without stopping to think about how differently each one got here. Blue Lakes Real Estate Group spends a lot of time in Leelanau County's smaller villages, and we like knowing the details behind the places our neighbors call home. If you ever want to talk about what's next for your own corner of it, we're glad to help. Let's work together.
