✨ Holistic Healing in Norton Shores, MI

Long before European settlement the dunes and the lakeshore were home to the Ojibwe, the Bodewadmi, also known as the Potawatomi, and the Odawa. Norton Township was organized in 1845 by settlers who came over from Mill Point, now Spring Lake, and took its name from Col. Amos Norton, a Canadian patriot implicated in the Rebellion of 1837 against British colonial rule. The township was separated from Ottawa County and joined Muskegon County in 1859. Robinson's Mill, the first sawmill, went up in 1847 at the head of what was then Black Lake and is now Mona Lake. When the mills and the box factory had run their course, residents turned to fruit. Boats collected berry crates from lakeside docks and carried them to Chicago, which is a very particular picture of how a Michigan shoreline economy once worked. The resort era arrived in 1894 with Hackley Park, named for the lumber baron Charles Hackley, and a resort post office called Hackley opened in 1895 and was gone by 1897. Norton Shores incorporated as a city in 1968, and the 2020 census counted 25,030 residents. Manufacturing remains the largest employment sector at roughly twenty-three percent of local jobs, followed by health care and retail. The Maranatha Bible and Missionary Conference still occupies its early twentieth century resort-style campus above the lake. Each December the Mona Shores Singing Christmas Tree puts a choir of about one hundred eighty students on a sixty-seven foot living-tree stage lit with roughly twenty-five thousand LED lights, billed as the tallest of its kind in America.