The Orchard Lake Museum site has long been a place where paths crossed and people met. The first building here was a small tavern called the Orchard Lake House, built in 1857 for stagecoach travelers. Later owners rebuilt and enlarged the property, renamed the Orchard Lake Hotel, to serve the growing lakeside resort community, especially city visitors arriving on nearby trolley cars in the early 1900s. In 1939 most of the building was torn down and replaced by the smaller Orchard Lake Village Hall, built on the fieldstone foundation of the original building and now occupied by the museum and the Greater West Bloomfield Historical Society.