Frankfort / Elberta — A Small Lighthouse-and-Harbor Town, Not a Resort-Strip

What Frankfort and Elberta Actually Are

Frankfort is an incorporated city of roughly 1,276 people (2024 aggregator estimate) on the north shore of Betsie Bay in Benzie County, on Michigan's northwest Lower Peninsula along US-31/M-22. Elberta sits directly across the bay on the south shore -- a much smaller village, population 329 at the 2020 Census, first settled in 1855 and originally incorporated as "South Frankfort" in 1894 before being renamed Elberta in 1911 after the Elberta peach, which grew locally at the time. The two communities are functionally one small harbor town split by water, connected by US-31/M-22 crossing the channel, and locals and regional coverage routinely refer to them together rather than as fully separate places -- which is why this page and destination entry cover both.

The single most important fact for understanding this market's identity is the car-ferry era, because it explains why Elberta exists in its current form at all. The Ann Arbor Railroad -- originally the Toledo, Ann Arbor and Northern Michigan Railway, renamed in 1892 -- began cross-Lake-Michigan car-ferry service that same year, carrying loaded railroad freight cars across the lake to Wisconsin ports (Kewaunee and Manitowoc) and, at various points, to Gladstone, Manistique, and Menominee in Michigan's Upper Peninsula. The ferry dock itself sat on the south side of Betsie Lake/Bay, in Elberta, even though the service was often referred to publicly as running out of "Frankfort" -- a naming quirk that still shows up in historical references today. One of the line's later vessels, the SS City of Milwaukee, was built in 1930-31 and ran the Muskegon-Milwaukee and Elberta-Kewaunee/Manitowoc routes for the Grand Trunk and then, from 1978, under charter to the Ann Arbor Railroad; when Ann Arbor's car-ferry operation shut down entirely in 1982, the City of Milwaukee was retired with it. That ship survives today, not in Frankfort or Elberta but in nearby Manistee, where it's preserved as a National Historic Landmark museum ship -- a real, visitable piece of this exact regional car-ferry economy, just not physically on-site here.

What actually remains in Elberta itself is more modest: the dock's coaling tower was removed at some point before December 2007, the rail turntable was filled in by 2005, and the old Ann Arbor Railroad freight office building has been restored and still stands. In other words, the industrial infrastructure that once made Elberta a working rail-ferry terminus is largely gone or repurposed, and the town today is a small, quiet residential and recreational community rather than an operating transportation hub -- a genuine before-and-after story a buyer should understand rather than assume is still active. Frankfort's own economic history followed a parallel arc: an early lumber-industry economy gave way, as Michigan's lumber boom declined in the early 20th century, to tourism and fruit farming (particularly cherries), and today tourism is the town's primary economic driver, alongside a real charter-fishing industry -- Frankfort's harbor, the Betsie River channel, and nearby Platte Bay give charter captains access to king salmon, coho, lake trout, and steelhead, and the 22-mile Betsie Valley Trail (built along former rail corridor, fittingly) is a genuine local recreation asset for cycling, walking, and winter cross-country skiing.

Point Betsie Lighthouse and the Character of the Town

Point Betsie Lighthouse, a few miles north of Frankfort's harbor mouth along Lake Michigan, is the area's best-known landmark and a genuinely old one: construction began in 1854 and the light first went into service for the 1858-59 shipping season, making it one of the older lighthouses on Lake Michigan's eastern shore. It has a real distinction in Great Lakes lighthouse history -- it was the last Lake Michigan lighthouse to be fully automated, with a modern optic installed in 1983 after 106 years of being staffed by resident keepers ("wickies"). The nonprofit Friends of Point Betsie Lighthouse has run a real, documented restoration effort since the mid-2000s: restoring the fog-signal building in 2008, then the tower and keeper's quarters interior, and recovering the lighthouse's original fourth-order Fresnel lens (which had been on display elsewhere, at the Sleeping Bear Point Coast Guard Station/Maritime Museum) back to the site -- work recognized with Michigan's Governor's Award for Historic Preservation in 2010.

Downtown Frankfort itself is small and walkable, built around galleries, apparel and specialty shops, and a handful of restaurants, with Mineral Springs Park and Frankfort's own beach along Lake Michigan providing direct lake access within town rather than requiring a drive. Betsie Bay itself functions as a working small-craft harbor and marina today rather than a rail-freight terminus -- a real, if smaller-scale, echo of its original industrial purpose. This is not a high-density resort strip on the scale of some larger Michigan lakeshore towns; it's a small-town identity built around the lighthouse, the harbor, the beach, and the fall salmon-run fishing season, which shapes both who buys here and what the real-cost and investment-outlook pages below cover in more depth.