If you've lived in Macatawa for more than a summer or two, you already know the shape of the Big Red conversation. Someone's out-of-town guest asks how to get up close to the lighthouse. A local explains that you can't, not really, and the conversation drifts into the usual mix of history, private property lines, and mild exasperation that's been circulating around Ottawa Beach Road for decades.
This year, that conversation actually changed. Not because access opened up. Because a Michigan court closed the door on the last serious legal argument that it ever would, and it did so in the same stretch of months that the community threw the lighthouse its biggest historical correction and its biggest party in years.
The Path Fight, Settled
The dispute goes back to 2022, when the Macatawa Park Association, a group of homeowners on the south side of the Holland Harbor channel, sued the Van Andel family over access to the private pathways that lead toward the lighthouse. The paths in question have names locals recognize: Bay Road, North Walk, and Lakeside Way. The association argued that decades of continuous use by its members had created a right to cross that land, and that Macatawa Park had historically functioned as a single resort community where those distinctions didn't apply.
The Ottawa County Circuit Court disagreed in 2024, ruling that the association's members did not have a legal right to those paths. The association appealed, and in April 2026, the Michigan Court of Appeals affirmed the lower court's decision. The attorneys for Van Andel Properties argued, successfully, that the association was trying to manufacture a right that had never existed in the first place, historical maps and old resort brochures notwithstanding.
A public petition, addressed to Holland Mayor Nathan Bocks, U.S. Rep. John Moolenaar, and Governor Gretchen Whitmer, has circulated since and gathered close to 900 signatures asking for negotiated public access. As of this year, it hasn't changed the legal outcome. The path question that's simmered since the last hotel on that land sold in the mid 1990s now has a court record behind it, not just an unresolved grievance.
A Corrected Marker, Weeks After the Ruling
Barely a month after the Court of Appeals closed the path question, the community turned its attention to a different kind of correction. Maritime historian Valerie van Heest, researching her book on Big Red and developing an exhibit for the Pump House Museum and Learning Center, found that the Michigan Historic Site marker installed in 1987 contained outdated and, in places, incorrect information. Some of what it left out mattered: the marker never mentioned the Odawa village led by Chief Waukazoo that stood near the future site of Holland before the Dutch settlers arrived in 1847, or that the Odawa relocated to the Leelanau Peninsula the following year to protect their culture and avoid smallpox.
The Michigan Historical Commission funded a full rewrite. A team including the Holland Harbor Lighthouse Historical Commission, Holland State Park, the Pump House Museum, the Holland Visitors Bureau, and the Holland Museum planned a rededication event, and the corrected marker was unveiled at Holland State Park on May 19, 2026. HHLHC president John Gronberg called it a meaningful moment for the community, one built on the work of many organizations correcting and sharing the lighthouse's history with more accuracy than the version most of us grew up with.
So within about a month of each other, Big Red got a legally settled property boundary and a factually corrected public record. Neither one made the lighthouse any easier to reach.
The Name That Shows Up Twice
Here's the detail that doesn't show up if you only read one story at a time. The Van Andel family that the Michigan Court of Appeals just sided with in the access dispute is not a stranger to the lighthouse's public life. Each year, in partnership with the Van Andel Family Foundation, HHLHC presents the Fourth of July fireworks display with Big Red as the backdrop. In 2026, that display carried extra weight, timed to the nationwide celebration of America's 250th anniversary, with the show visible from Holland State Park or from the water.
That means the same family whose private property rights just got affirmed by an appeals court is also, through its foundation, one of the reasons thousands of people gather at Holland State Park every July to watch the lighthouse lit up against the sky. It's not a contradiction so much as a fact about how this particular stretch of shoreline works: private ownership and public celebration have coexisted here for a long time, and this year both of those threads surfaced within weeks of each other.
What "Seeing Big Red" Actually Means Now
With the legal question closed, the practical answer for residents is the same one HHLHC has been publishing for years, just with less ambiguity about whether something better might be coming. The sanctioned ways to experience the lighthouse are:
- Holland State Park's boardwalk, which HHLHC itself calls the closest public vantage point, especially at sunset, on the north side of the channel.
- Mount Pisgah, where 239 steps get you to an overlook of Big Red and Lake Michigan that photographers have relied on for years.
- The Holland Princess Paddlewheel Cruise, a narrated boat tour that gives you the water-level view the shoreline can't.
Beyond the view itself, the Pump House Museum and Learning Center, the last surviving structure of the old Hotel Ottawa complex, houses the permanent exhibit on Big Red's transition from navigational aid to cultural icon, along with the story of Lakewood Farm and Jenison Electric Park, the two amusement destinations that once drew visitors to Lake Macatawa's shores. The Holland Museum holds the lighthouse's original Fresnel lens. Between the two, you get a fuller history of the lighthouse than you'd get standing at its base, even if you could stand at its base.
The workarounds that circulated informally for years, wading ashore behind the south breakwater or walking four miles up the beach from Laketown, were always legally fraught given Michigan's high-water-mark rules. With the appeals court ruling now on record, they read less like a loophole and more like exactly what they've always been.
Why This Matters If You Live Here
None of this changes anything about your Tuesday. It changes what you tell people when they ask. For years, the honest answer to "can we go see it" was a shrug and a mention of a lawsuit that hadn't been decided yet. Now the answer has more shape to it: no, and a court has said so twice, but here's where to stand for the best photo, here's the museum with the actual lens, and here's the family whose foundation pays for the fireworks you'll watch from the same spot.
Big Red has spent 156 years being simultaneously the most photographed lighthouse in Michigan and one of the hardest to reach. This year didn't change that balance. It just made the terms of it a lot clearer, and gave the community a corrected history and a court record to go along with the view.
If you're weighing a move to the Macatawa area or thinking about what life along this stretch of the Lakeshore actually looks like day to day, from settled legal questions like this one to the sunsets that make Mount Pisgah worth the climb, Michigan Homes & Cottages can walk you through it. Request your complimentary lakeshore marketing plan and we'll show you what it's like to actually live here, view included or not.
