Sister Lakes Doesn't Run On A Parks Department. It Runs On A Few Family Names.

Drive down Sister Lakes Road right now, in the middle of August, and you will pass a building that has spent more than two years teaching this community something about itself. The framing at Ramona Roller Rink has been rising board by board since a lightning strike burned the original structure to its floorboards on May 7, 2024. There is no city crew on that site. There is no line item in a municipal budget paying for the new walls. There is a family named Schaus, a car show, two birthday parties held in a parking lot because there was nowhere else to hold them, and a community that kept showing up with cash and lumber money because that is simply how things get rebuilt here.

That is the thing about Sister Lakes that a weekend visitor never quite picks up on. The town's calendar, the buildings that anchor it, the traditions that repeat every summer without fail, none of it is run by an agency. It is run by a handful of family names, one volunteer club, and the neighbors on Magician Lake who never bothered forming a committee because the tradition never needed one. Once you notice that pattern, the whole place reads differently.

The rink that insurance couldn't fully cover

Ramona opened in 1928 as a dance hall on Round Lake, which makes it very nearly a century old. Harold Schaus III started working there in 1975 and bought the place in 2004, so the Schaus family has had a hand in Ramona for more than half its life. When the fire hit in May 2024, insurance did not cover the full cost of rebuilding a structure that old to current code. The family's answer was not a claim dispute. It was a car show fundraiser in the parking lot that same summer, followed by a 96th birthday party held on the same gravel where the rink used to stand, and a 97th the following July while the new walls were still going up around them. Local coverage of the framing has tracked the project for over a year, and the goal the family has stated publicly is straightforward: skates back on a new floor, built on the same footprint, as close to the old style as modern code allows.

More than two years after the fire, the building is still the clearest marker in town of how Sister Lakes solves its own problems. Nobody hired a contractor from outside and moved on. The people who grew up skating there are the people rebuilding it.

Who actually runs the summer

The pattern extends well past the roller rink. Here is what decades of family ownership actually look like when you line it up side by side.

Look at the middle rows for a second. Driftwood Summer Shop and Dockside Dan's sit about a hundred feet apart on Round Lake, and they are run by sisters. Heather VanAntwerp took over Dockside Dan's the same year her sister Alli and brother in law Dan LaFond were seven years into running Driftwood next door. That is not a coincidence of small town business ownership. That is one family deciding both properties needed to stay in the family, and doing something about it.

The ice cream counter that never really changed hands

Driftwood is worth sitting with for a moment because its ownership history is basically a study in how this town keeps its landmarks intact. Carl and Lucille Timmons built the shop in 1948. The VanAntwerp family bought it and ran it for 35 summers, from 1983 to 2017. When Dan and Alli LaFond bought it in 2018, Alli was buying it from her own aunt and uncle. The Sherman's Ice Cream counter, the Vienna Beef hot dogs, the arcade full of older games, none of that changed hands to a stranger. It changed hands to family, the same way Ramona changed hands to Harold Schaus, the same way Sister Lakes Brewing Company has stayed with the Morins for a full decade now.

Ask a longtime resident why Driftwood still feels the way it felt twenty years ago and the honest answer is that it never actually left the family that has always run it.

The volunteers who run the calendar's two loudest nights

Two traditions, neither one run by a government body, mark the loudest nights of the Sister Lakes summer. Magician Lake residents put on a boat parade every Labor Day weekend and a picnic every Fourth of July at the Polk Waterfront, both kept alive year after year by the neighbors who show up rather than any outside organizer. The Sister Lakes Lions Club runs the fireworks finale at Lions Park that marks the unofficial end of summer, the kind of event where families are told to arrive early and bring a picnic basket because there is no ticketed seating and no vendor to buy dinner from. Both traditions exist because residents decided they should exist and then kept showing up to make it happen, without anyone from the county involved.

Sister Lakes Brewing Company's own arc fits the same shape. The Morin family opened the brewery ten years ago with the stated goal of fostering community one pint at a time, and marked the anniversary this past June 20 with a JamFest headlined by the Chicago band Mr. Blotto, alongside free family activities that ran for hours before the music even started. A brewery celebrating a decade in business is not unusual. A brewery whose owners frame the milestone explicitly around community, in a town where every other landmark is run the same way, starts to look less like branding and more like description.

What this actually means for the next three weeks

Labor Day falls on Monday, September 7 this year, which puts the town in its final quiet stretch before the two events that close the season. If you live here, this is what that stretch actually looks like on the ground.

• The sandbar off Round Lake, the informal gathering spot for pontoons all summer, thins out considerably on weekdays now that families with school age kids are pulling their boats earlier in the evening.
• Driftwood's dinner rush has softened from its July peak, which means an actual seat at the counter instead of a line out the door.
• Families on Magician Lake are already coordinating boats for the Labor Day parade, an informal but well established tradition that residents have kept running themselves for years.
• The Sister Lakes Lions Club is finalizing plans for the End of Summer fireworks at Lions Park, the traditional close to the season.
• The framing at Ramona keeps rising along Sister Lakes Road, still the clearest visible sign of how long a community rebuild actually takes when the people doing it are neighbors rather than contractors.

None of this is happening because a parks department scheduled it. It is happening because the same families and the same neighbors have been doing this work for decades, and this particular August is simply the latest lap.

If you are new to one of the ten lakes here, or you have been on Round Lake or Magician Lake long enough to remember Ramona before the fire, that pattern is worth knowing. It explains why a business changing hands here so often means a niece taking over from an aunt rather than a chain moving in, and why a fire at a rink built in 1928 turned into a multi year community rebuild instead of a permanent closure.

For anyone thinking through what it actually means to put down roots on one of these lakes, from financing a waterfront cottage to understanding what a home near Round Lake or Magician Lake is really worth, Lifestyle Properties Group knows this stretch of Southwest Michigan the way the Schaus and Morin and LaFond families know their own front doors. From Vision to Keys, let's get started.