Two Things Harbert Almost Didn't Get, and Got Anyway This Year

In late July 2023, a Midwest classic rock cover band called the Edgar Willbury Experience plugged in on a brand-new stage at Harbert Community Park and played the first real concert the space had ever hosted. A few hundred people showed up with lawn chairs and dinner from a food truck. It was, by most accounts, a good night. But it was also, as far as anyone on the park board would admit, only half of what they were hoping for.

A park board member named Martin told a Harbor Country News reporter that night that the walkway and landscaping people were enjoying were just Phase I. Phase II was still a maybe.

"If we get it, Phase II would include pickleball courts behind the dog park and Township Hall, a trail system that would go behind the stage and up into the woods."

That was the whole pitch. No groundbreaking ceremony, no rendering, just a grant application and a hope. Three years later, in June 2026, Chikaming Township held a ribbon-cutting at that same park, and Martin's list from 2023 had become, almost item for item, the thing people were walking around looking at.

What Actually Opened This June

The June 27 celebration at Harbert Community Park unveiled new pickleball courts, public restrooms, added storage, an ADA-accessible pathway system, and a trail connection linking the park directly to the Red Arrow Linear Park trailhead. Native landscaping with pollinator plantings now runs along the new paths. None of it happened by accident or by a single check being written. The project came together through an $878,700 Michigan Department of Natural Resources ARPA Spark Grant, with Chikaming Township covering a 10 percent match.

Layer in the smaller, older additions and the place starts to read less like a single construction project and more like a community that kept adding to something over a decade. The River Valley Garden Club donated plants and labor to build a Fern Garden near the play area. A red bud tree near the pavilion honors Jeanne Dudeck, who served as township clerk and supervisor for more than 30 years and who pushed to get a Carl Sandburg historical marker placed next to the park's Welcome Pavilion. Sandburg lived in Harbert for years and wrote his Pulitzer Prize winning Abraham Lincoln: The War Years while he was there. The marker has sat near that pavilion since 2015, long before anyone was talking about pickleball courts.

Here's how the wish list from that July 2023 night matches up against what actually showed up this June:

The park board didn't get everything exactly as sketched. There was no formal promise of restrooms in 2023, and they got built anyway, likely because a project funded through a state grant tends to expand once the paperwork is moving. But the core ask, the one Martin staked his credibility on that summer night, came through whole.

The Concerts Never Stopped

The stage that hosted that first 2023 show is still doing its job. Harbert's Music in the Park series runs Saturdays at 5:30 p.m. through the summer at Harbert Community Park, 13538 Red Arrow Highway. It's the kind of series that doesn't need much marketing because the loop is already built into people's weekends: bring a chair, catch whichever act is booked that week, walk the new trail before or after if the light's still good.

The park's ice rink and the smaller "Dinky Rink" for young skaters return in winter, a reminder that the Phase I and Phase II work wasn't just about summer. A 2017 Heart of Cook Grant paid for community skates that are still available free at the rink each season. Harbert Community Park has been accumulating small, funded improvements for years. This summer's ribbon-cutting was just the most visible one.

Down the Road, a Bigger Surprise

If the park's story is about a promise finally kept, the story just down the road at the Judith Racht Gallery is about an ending that didn't take.

The gallery sits in a converted schoolhouse at 13689 Prairie Road, a building turning 100 years old this year. Judith Racht has run the space for more than 40 years, and for nearly as long she's hosted the Outsiders Outside Art Fair over Labor Day weekend, a showcase for self-taught folk and outsider artists who never went to art school but built serious bodies of work anyway. Last year's fair, the 30th, ran August 29 through 31, 2025, and was announced as the last Outsider show. Coverage at the time framed it as a freedom-filled finale, treating 2025 as the close of a three-decade run.

It isn't ending. Earlier this year, Racht was introduced to M.T. Giddings, a South Bend based artist, organizer, and educator who leads the Motels4Now Art Workshop, a program launched in March 2024 that works with guests of Motels4Now, a low-barrier homeless shelter operated by the nonprofit New Day Intake Center. Giddings agreed to serve as Racht's right hand for a 2026 encore, and the fair is returning this Labor Day weekend with artwork from the Motels4Now workshop included alongside the usual roster of folk and outsider artists. Giddings is also organizing this year's volunteer staff. Planning meetings at the gallery started back in May, and organizers have been recruiting community members to help pull it off.

So the fair that was supposed to close out in 2025 is instead marking two anniversaries at once this year: the gallery's 40-plus years in Harbert, and the schoolhouse building's 100th birthday. The weekend traditionally opens with a Friday evening preview party, with the show running through the weekend after that.

The Pattern Underneath Both Stories

Neither of these things happened because a developer drew up a master plan or a city council pushed a five-year strategy through committee. The park got its trail and its courts because a small group of people wrote a grant, matched it locally, and kept adding volunteer touches like a garden club's donated plants and a memorial tree, one piece at a time, over roughly a decade. The art fair is continuing because one woman met one other artist a few months before what was supposed to be her final show, and decided the show could still happen.

That's a specific kind of place to live in. Things get built and things get preserved because someone specific decided to keep pushing, not because Harbert is on some regional development pipeline. If you've lived here through both the Phase I stage debut and this June's ribbon-cutting, you already know that pace. If you're newer, it's worth understanding: the community calendar here moves on local persistence, and that's exactly why a wish list quoted in a 2023 news article can still be checked off, almost line by line, three years later.

What This Means for Your Next Two Weekends

If you're local, the practical version of all this is simple. The Saturday concerts at Harbert Community Park are still running at 5:30 p.m. through the rest of the summer, and now you've got a new ADA trail and pickleball courts to use before or after the show. And the Outsiders Outside Art Fair is back at the Judith Racht Gallery this Labor Day weekend, with a Friday evening opening party and days of folk and outsider art running through the weekend, this time with work from the Motels4Now Art Workshop woven into the mix. Neither event needed to happen this year. Both are happening because someone in Harbert decided they should.

If Harbert's mix of grassroots persistence and quiet, incremental improvement is the kind of place you want to know more about, whether you already call it home or you're weighing what life here actually looks like season to season, the Choose Chad Team knows this stretch of Harbor Country block by block. Let's Connect.