Staying in Barryton

Four hundred and five people. That is the whole census, counted in 2020, and a good share of them will tell you the reason to come is somewhere past the village limits — out on the water, over in the game area, off where the pavement quits and the gravel starts talking under your tires.

Barryton sits in Fork Township, up in the northeast corner of Mecosta County, on M-66. Frank and Marion Barry platted it in 1894, on farmland at the fork of two branches of the Chippewa River, and named it after themselves — the kind of confidence you had in 1894 when the Pere Marquette was about to run track through your cow pasture. Within five years the railroad and a daily stage were serving five hundred citizens. The village peaked early. It has held more or less the same size ever since, 981 feet up, a few streets on a slow grade, a post office, a school, and a great deal of sky.

You come in on M-66 or you come in on the county roads, and either way the last stretch is flat farm country going to woodlot, the smell of it turning from cut hay to cold water somewhere around the township line. Big Rapids is about twenty miles west. Mount Pleasant is thirty to the southeast, closer to forty-five minutes than you want after dark. Nobody’s passing through. That is the first honest thing about the place. Barryton is not on the way to anything.

What it is for is the water and the game land, and the two are close enough to argue about.

The Martiny Chain of Lakes runs southwest of the village — Tubbs, Big Evans, Upper and Lower Evans, Saddlebag, Boom, Bass, Dogfish, and more, stitched together by channels that run about six feet deep and shallower where you least want it. It is flatwater fishing, not a postcard. Largemouth bass, bluegill, crappie, and pike if you want numbers over size. The county keeps a campground on Tubbs Lake inside the Martiny Lake State Game Area — thirty-three rustic sites, vault toilets, no reservations, open May to the first of December, and about eight miles from the village. Anglers on the forums will swear Chippewa Lake, a few miles off, holds the better northern pike. If you can find them. Which is the whole sentence about pike, always.

Then there is Haymarsh. The Haymarsh Lake State Game Area covers something near 6,700 acres of upland forest, lowland swamp, open water, and marsh, run by the DNR for whatever will hunt or nest in it — deer, grouse, turkey, waterfowl, and the birders who come with lists and long lenses for all of the above. Nineteen rustic sites, a hand pump, a pit toilet, an unimproved launch, first come and no attendant to smile at you. In late October it smells like leaf rot and gun oil and somebody’s woodsmoke two ridges over, and the sound after legal light is close to nothing. A crow. A truck door somewhere down the shoreline. That is the amenity, the entire amenity.

So you don’t stay in Barryton so much as near it. There is no hotel — there was never going to be a hotel — so you rent a house on one of the lakes and drive into the village for gas, a sandwich, and whatever the hardware shelf still stocks. We keep a couple of places out on the chain. Close enough to the water that you will hear it work at night, far enough off M-66 that you will hear nothing else. This one is where I would point a first-timer — a dock, a woodstove that does the real work, a kitchen table that seats more people than you will bring. If your crew is smaller, this house is the tighter, cheaper version of the same quiet. Look at what is open on the Barryton page and choose by the lake, not the finish.

Eat is a short conversation. The village runs on a bar-and-grill economy and a gas-station-pizza economy, and both do about what they promise — I put the whole of it, such as it is, in Where to Eat in Barryton. For the doing, the chain and the game land each earn their own write-up. If you want the walk-in-cold version of Haymarsh and the Martiny water, start with Things to Do near Barryton. Then come for the right stretch of the calendar, because this is fall country first and ice-shanty country second and a hard sell in mud season, which I say plainly in Barryton’s Best Season.

None of it will sell you anything. That is the point, and it is also the risk — some people need a town to do more than sit there. Most people stop needing that by the second night. The water does not care either way.

Bring a jacket you will want to burn after. Come in October.