Bear Cave, Buchanan, MI

Hi there. My name is Pam...I&#39;m 69 years old now, but when I was 12 years old, my grandparents OWNED Bear Cave and the picnic and camp grounds connected to it! I don&#39;t know what is there now, but at the time there was a souvenir shop built around the entry to the cave, and upstairs from that on a second story to the building was a small apartment. My grandparents had a house up the road from the park, but when I&#39;d come to visit every summer, I would sometimes get to stay with my older sister in the upstairs apartment. I also helped out at the cash register for the souvenir shop, and my favorite job--I got to guide people through the cave. It was always billed as the &quot;only cave in the state of Michigan,&quot; and I was proud my family owned it. It was a thrill to feel real grownup, and be able to tell people the stories about the Pottawatomie Indians, the Underground Railroad, and explain the difference between stalagmites and stalactites. My grandfather did a lot of research about the cave after he bought it, and was considered the foremost expert in the area about details of its history. Some of the stories being told by guides now probably go back to his research. <br /><br />Yes, there were bats ... sometimes they would come up the stairway that led down to the cave, and if someone opened the door at just the wrong time, one would fly into the souvenir shop. I don&#39;t think that happened too often.<br /><br />When my grandparents bought the cave, about 1957, there actually was a bear there. It was a cub, and lived in a big cage that was next to the pathway between the cave entrance/souvenir building and the camp grounds. It died before it became full grown, and they never bought another. <br /><br />There were no &quot;flush toilets&quot; available for cave visitors or campground campers...you had to walk down a long path to the edge of the campground and use &quot;outhouses&quot; ...yes, the kind that just had a hole in the ground. And you washed your hands by pumping water yourself with an old handpump near the toilet buildings. No soap. <br /><br />I don&#39;t think the campsites even had electricity at the time my grandparents bought the park. My grandfather put in a lot of improvements over the next few years, including indoor modern bathroom and shower buildings, electricity, a swimming pool, and more. He also had a large power boat that would hold about a dozen people, and visitors would pay for a short ride down the St Jo River. <br /><br />I&#39;m glad your family enjoyed its visit to Bear Cave! Your 50-state trip sounds like great fun. Homeschooling (or Unschooling :-) ) is great for such things. I happened to be the first parent in the state of Michigan in modern times to legally home-school my grade school age child, starting in 1977 when she was six years old. At the time, you literally had to have a teaching certificate to legally home school without being hassled by the powers that be. I happened to have a degree in Education and a teaching certificate, so we didn&#39;t have the hassle many others did at the time. It certainly gave us great flexibility for a lot of travel too. <br /><br />I stumbled on your blog while looking for pictures of Bear Cave. I only have one photo from my childhood, and none that showed the interior of the cave. I am planning on writing a little auto-bio for use on the Web with some of my writings, and would like to request permission to use your pictures of the cave--none that show the children&#39;s faces. Please let me know if that is OK with you. You can email me at oasis7@gmail.com. <br /><br />Thanks again for your cheery notes and pics about your Bear Cave visit!<br /><br />Pam Dewey, Savannah GA (formerly from Michigan until 2007)

Hi--this is Pam Dewey again. I just looked closely at the pic of the soda fountain again and finally paid attention to your caption. The Sweet Shop! I&#39;d forgotten all about it. Back in the late 1950s when visiting my grandparents at the Cave grounds, I&#39;d go there with my teenage older brother and sister. It was THE place to hangout for Buchanan teens at the time. In the 1980s my parents lived in Buchanan, right down the street a few blocks from the Sweet Shop, and my daughter, now 44, remembers going to the Sweet Shop regularly when she&#39;d visit HER grandparents. It was pretty much still the only place for a child to hang out in that small town. Thanks so much for the walk down memory lane.