Living in Montague, Michigan

Here is where I actually send people. The Book Nook and Java Shop is a bookstore with a cafe, a bar and food, and it puts on poetry nights, live instruments, pianists and author events. Lipka's is an old pharmacy that is not a pharmacy any more, and they still do milkshakes and malts the old-fashioned way. Both are on the same block as the library, which means you park once and get an afternoon out of it.

Twisters, in the Montague Foods parking lot, is known for the extreme shake of the week. In the fall there is the pumpkin roll, where the kids line up with their pumpkins to see whose rolls farthest down the hill. It has been running for years and the whole town turns out. There is a farmers market, there are car shows, and there are the shed shops, small storefronts built as sheds and mini houses that local businesses rent.

The bike trail starts here. The William Field Memorial Hart-Montague Trail runs 22.7 miles from Montague north to Hart, and it was the first paved rail trail in Michigan when it opened in 1989. It is built on the bed of the old Chicago and Michigan Lake Shore Railroad, which is why it runs so straight and so flat. Ride the other way and it joins the Berry Junction Trail through Whitehall and on to North Muskegon, so you can go Muskegon to Hart on one continuous paved path.

And then there is Flower Creek Trail, signed at the bottom of the stairs as the John J. Helstrom Dune Ridge Trail, which is part of why almost nobody finds it. Park at Meinert County Park, just north of town, and walk about a quarter of a mile up the Lake Michigan shore to reach the trailhead. Then you go up the stairs. From there it runs dunes, into woods, along the side of the creek, back into dunes, back into woods. Meinert itself has around 2,000 feet of Lake Michigan beach and a campground, and it is the kind of place that stays quiet because people do not know to look for it.

What follows is the way the market here actually divides, which is by what you are buying rather than by subdivision.

White Lake and the channel. The town side. Depth, bottom, dock setup and how the wind sits on your stretch all change what a property is worth to you specifically, and none of that is in the listing. Channel frontage and open-lake frontage are not the same thing to live on.

The White River. The river flows into White Lake and carries waterfront of its own. It is quieter water than the lake, it behaves differently through the year, and it is the part of Montague most out-of-town buyers never think to search.

Lake Michigan, out along Old Channel Trail. A Montague address reaches west to the big lake, and there are Lake Michigan waterfront homes along Old Channel Trail. This is worth saying plainly, because it is not what the city limits look like on a map. Out here the mailing address covers a lot more ground than the city does, which is normal for how rural West Michigan is laid out and surprising to anybody arriving from a city. This is a different market again, with different weather on it and a different buyer. Old Channel Trail Golf Course is out here too, 27 holes along the shore, which is a useful landmark if you have never driven this far west and are trying to picture where the township ends. If somebody tells you Montague is a White Lake town, they have not been out this far.

All three start here: waterfront homes in Montague. Tell me which water you mean and I will tell you what changes.

Vacant land. Montague still has wooded parcels and acreage outside town, and land is where buyers get hurt. Buildability, septic, well, setbacks and access are decided before you own it, not after. See lakeshore land in Montague.

In town. Walkable streets close to the downtown block, and the homes that turn over most often to people moving here rather than moving up. If you are coming from out of state, relocating to Montague covers what the first year actually looks like.

Second homes and rentals. Plenty of people buy here for the summer and rent the rest. Short-term rental rules are set township by township and they are not the same everywhere. See vacation rental property in Montague.