Staying in Evart: the Muskegon River town in Osceola County

The state tore up US-10 through the middle of Evart this spring. April 6, a rebuild — new pavement, new curb, a flagger in a vest where 7th Street used to just be a street — and it runs to mid-November. You smell the hot tar before you smell the river. That is not a warning. It is close to the whole point of the place.

Evart is small in a way that reads as an accusation to people who need a town to perform for them. 1,742 at the 2020 count. US-10 comes in from the west, runs down 7th Street past the storefronts as the town’s one true artery, crosses the Muskegon River on the far edge, and leaves — the same move you will make in a few days. Reed City to the west, the county seat. Clare to the east, where the two-lane finally gives up and turns into freeway. A municipal airport on the north edge, a fairgrounds on the south, and a river doing all the real work in between. Not the kind of small you blink and miss. The kind with a hardware store and a current.

The drive in tells on itself. From the east it is twenty-odd minutes of two-lane off the freeway near Clare, farm country and second-growth woods, the speed limit dropping in steps until you are already in it. From the west it is Reed City and then the same. Either way the town announces itself with a water tower and a block of old brick downtown — enough of it kept that the district carries a historic name on a plaque and gets ignored the other fifty-one weeks. That is not a knock. A downtown that has to earn its keep looks like this.

The history is lumber, the way most of this part of Michigan is lumber. The town went up in 1871 when the Flint and Pere Marquette Railroad reached the riverbank and somebody built a mill and a store beside the water in the same year. It took the name of Perry Everts — an Osceola County pioneer and Union soldier who had bought eighty acres where the streets now sit — except a clerk misspelled it Evart when the post office opened, and the misspelling won. Towns get named by whoever fills out the form. The pine is long gone. The river stayed.

The Muskegon is the second-longest river in the state, 227 miles from Houghton Lake down to Lake Michigan, and by the time it reaches Evart it runs wide and slow and cold and tea-dark under the cedar. Smallmouth in the warm months. Trout and steelhead lower and later, when the water drops. This is not the Au Sable — not blue-ribbon, not a purist’s river in waders — it is warmer and more forgiving, better for a family in two canoes than for anybody with something to prove. Outfitters on the river will rent you a boat and run the shuttle. It forgives a bad paddler. That is a compliment.

Riverside Park is where the town shakes hands with the water, and mostly it is honest about the exchange. Seventeen acres on the west bank, southeast corner of the city — a walking trail along the current, a boat ramp, canoe access, fishing platforms, a splash pad that runs eleven to eight from early summer to the last day of September, ball fields, shuffleboard courts. Across the river, thirty-three more acres the city bought in 2003 with a state trust-fund grant, quieter and less mown. Riverside Park East. A campground with water and power at the sites. You can haul a canoe out of the Muskegon and be at a picnic table before your shoes finish draining.

Here is the honest version of what Evart is for. The river — fishing it, floating it, sitting near it at the temperature it holds even in August, which is colder than you want and exactly right. The quiet, and not the brochure kind. The kind with a lawnmower in it, a freight train, and a dog two yards over who has opinions. It is not for shopping. It is not for a scene. Most nights the loudest thing downtown is the light changing.

And then, for one weekend, it is for dulcimers.

The third weekend of July, the Osceola County Fairgrounds on Recreation Avenue fill up with the Original Dulcimer Players Club — formed in 1963, running this festival on the fairgrounds since 1974 — and the town does something strange to its own population in a hurry. The ODPC Funfest. Hammered dulcimers by the hundred, mountain dulcimers, fiddles, gospel singing, contra dancing, and jam sessions that leak into the small hours in the lanes between the campers. In 2026 it fell July 16 through 18 — ten dollars a day, twenty for all three, kids twelve and under free. The sound of it at dusk, a hundred sets of strings under a hundred hammers drifting across the fairgrounds, is either the best argument for coming in July or the reason to book a different week. I would come for it. Pack earplugs anyway.

There is the campground and there are motels out by the highway, and neither is why you drive up here. Take a house. one of our Michigan log cabin rentals, Coyote Fire Retreat, sits close enough to the water that you hear it work at night, the thing you came for, running while you sleep. Coyote Fire Retreat gives you a kitchen and a screen door and room to hang wet things, which is the actual list an Evart trip asks for. Not a lobby. Not a view of the lot. Everything we keep in town is here: https://roamstays.com/location/evart/.

Eat: the food reality is small, and I have written it flat in Where to Eat in Evart — read it before you assume you can wing a Sunday. Do: the water is the whole draw. Where to put in and what the current runs like, that is laid out in Things to Do near Evart. When: July is warm and loud and full of strings, and September is the weekend I would pick — the case for it is in the season post, and there is a two-night version of the whole thing in A Weekend in Evart.

Come for the river. Stay off 7th Street till the crew goes home.