After the American Civil War (1861-1865), a new wealthy class with the time and means to leave industrialized cities for the summer helped make the Little Traverse Bay region one of Michigan’s first popular resort areas in the 1870s, first reached by passenger steamer on the Great Lakes and later promoted through railroad-owned resorts. By 1922, improvements on the West Michigan Pike and in state parks made the dunes of West Michigan much more accessible, and inexpensive automobile travel allowed the rising middle class, including many immigrants from Chicago, to vacation there, leading modest cottage resorts serving specific ethnic populations to spread along the shore. During the 1880s, Jews fleeing persecution in Eastern Europe came to the United States hoping to own land, and some used loans from the Chicago Jewish Agriculture Society to buy farms in the South Haven area. Around 1917, as auto tourists increasingly vacationed there and Jews often struggled to find lodging because some facilities excluded ethnic, racial, and religious groups, South Haven’s Jewish farmers began renting rooms and then converted their farms into resorts. Their success encouraged others to open Jewish resorts, most along North Shore Drive, and by the late 1920s more than sixty operated in South Haven, giving it the nickname “The Catskills of the Midwest.”