Muskegon’s lumber barons got two showings Oct. 10–11: their houses by day, their graves at dusk

MUSKEGON, Mich. — Charles Hackley, one of the richest of Muskegon’s lumber barons, did not wait to be buried to see his monument. He had it built while he was alive, on the theory that something that handsome should be enjoyed. On the weekend of Oct. 10-11, visitors could see both ends of that life: the house he built on West Webster Avenue and the cemetery where his family’s monument still stands.

Start at the Hackley & Hume Historic Site, 484 W. Webster Ave., where the Lakeshore Museum Center ran tours Saturday from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. and Sunday from 1 to 4 p.m. No registration was needed, and the last tour left at 4. Tours also took in the Fire Barn Museum and the Scolnik House of the Depression Era, according to the museum.

Muskegon County residents got in free on October weekends, the museum’s thanks for the county millage that supports it. Visitors from outside the county paid $15 for adults, $12 for seniors and $5 for children 2 to 12. The museum said the October tours came before the sites closed for the season.

After the last tour Saturday, visitors could head to Evergreen Cemetery for City of the Dead, a reenactment tour in which community actors in period dress tell Muskegon’s history from the point of view of the people buried there. It ran from 5 to 8 p.m. Saturday and 2 to 4 p.m. Sunday, rain or shine, according to the city’s event listing.

The event has been held on the second weekend of October since 2009. In a 2023 guest post for Visit Muskegon, organizers described past characters including a lumber baron who sued nearly everyone who crossed him, his own brother among them, women who worked in the mills and the sawmill hands of the “Ten Hours or No Saw-Dust” strike.

The cemetery carries its own history. Organizers wrote that Mayor Chauncey Davis donated 10 acres of farmland for it after the city’s first burial ground filled, and that a Ladies Cemetery Association later fenced and planted the grounds in the garden-cemetery style of the era. The Hackley monument, built of Vermont granite shipped in by boat, is the largest in the section once auctioned off to the city’s leading families. The cemetery is also the resting place of Capt. Jonathan Walker, the abolitionist whose hand was branded “S.S.” for “slave stealer.”

Sunday’s hours overlapped, so visitors had to pick one: the houses from 1 to 4 p.m. or the cemetery from 2 to 4. The city’s listing did not give an admission price for City of the Dead, and Saturday’s tours ran past sunset.

Updated Oct. 12, 2026: These events took place Oct. 10-11. This guide was published before them, and its schedule language has been changed to the past tense.

Updated Oct. 13, 2026: The headline and summary were changed to the past tense for events that have already taken place.

Sources:
City of Muskegon, “City of the Dead” event listing, Oct. 10–11, 2026, https://muskegon-mi.gov/event/city-of-the-dead-2/
Visit Muskegon, “City of the Dead Tour and History of Evergreen Cemetery in Muskegon, Michigan” (guest post by City of the Dead), Sept. 14, 2023, https://www.visitmuskegon.org/blog/post/city-of-the-dead-tour-and-history-of-evergreen-cemetery-in-muskegon-michigan/
Lakeshore Museum Center, “Free Historic Site Tours for Muskegon County Residents,” Oct. 10, 2026, https://lakeshoremuseum.org/event/free-historic-site-tours-for-muskegon-county-residents-7/2026-10-10/
Lakeshore Museum Center, “Free Historic Site Tours for Muskegon County Residents,” Oct. 11, 2026, https://lakeshoremuseum.org/event/free-historic-site-tours-for-muskegon-county-residents-5/2026-10-11/
Photo: rossograph, “Evergreen Cemetery-Muskegon,” October 24, 2014, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/), cropped and color-corrected; derivative under the same ShareAlike license, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Evergreen_Cemetery-Muskegon.jpg

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