A Clare Summer, Read Along McEwan Street

Most towns experience summer as a calendar. Clare experiences it as an axis. The Pere Marquette Rail Trail rolls thirty paved miles out of Midland and stops, quite literally, at the corner of Fourth and Pine, which puts every cyclist, walker, and skater within a two-block walk of nearly everything worth doing downtown. If you already live here, you know this. What may have crept up on you is how much has been added to that two-block stretch since roughly 2022, and how differently a summer Saturday now unspools because of it.

This isn't a festival roundup. It's a way of reading what the season has quietly become.

The trail ends where the town begins

The Pere Marquette Rail Trail runs between 101 Ashman St in Midland and E Fourth St and Pine St in Clare, which means your neighbors on bikes are arriving at the town's front door, not its edge. From that trailhead, McEwan Street is a five-minute pedal north. Ray's Bike Shop sits at 425 McEwan Street, which is a useful thing to remember around mile 28 when a tire starts making a noise it shouldn't.

The geography matters because it collapses the usual small-town summer problem of "where do we park, then walk, then eat, then walk back." In Clare, the ride is the walk. The trail deposits you on the same street that holds the brewery, the doughnut shop, the fudge counter, the Thai kitchen, the diner, the tavern, and the twelve-tenant retail block that didn't exist five years ago. That is not a coincidence. It is what a preserved rail corridor does to a downtown when the downtown cooperates.

What the last few seasons actually added

If you've lived here more than a decade, the reference points for "downtown" were probably Cops & Doughnuts, the 1896 Clare City Bakery that nine officers bought and renamed, plus the Doherty Hotel and a handful of longtime diners. The block still leans on those anchors. But the tenant list has thickened in ways worth naming:

• Cardinal & Clover Collaborative, Christine Smith's restoration of the former William H. Bicknell & Co. Department Store, opened in 2022 as a 20,000-square-foot building housing 12 shops and businesses — hair salon, tattoo studio, boutiques, yoga studio, jewelry, and more, under one roof.
• Calla Lily Mercantile, Lacey Badelt's boutique, sits inside the historic 515 building.
• McEwan Street Fudge & Ice Cream Shop, added last year, features hand-dipped ice cream and kettle fudge made on site, with gelato equipment purchased through a $25,000 Match on Main grant from the Michigan Economic Development Corporation.
• Four Leaf Brewing opened its pub and taproom in August 2015 in the former Davis Block, with a flagship cherry wheat called Lady Luck, and it now anchors the block for streetside evenings.
• Herrick House and The Mulberry Cafe share a Victorian structure on 5th Street, running breakfast and lunch alongside a small shopping footprint.

Round that out with the Whitehouse Restaurant at 613 N McEwan, Timeout Tavern at 601 N McEwan, Ruk Thai Kitchen, and The Evening Post Bar & Grill, and the block reads as denser and more varied than it did the last time you tried to sell an out-of-town cousin on eating in Clare instead of driving to Mt. Pleasant.

A Saturday, roughly

Nobody actually schedules a Clare summer Saturday. But if you were to reverse-engineer one from what the town now supports, it would look something like this:

1. Coffee and something warm at Cops & Doughnuts, early, before the parking gets weird.
2. A ride east on the trail toward Loomis or as far as Coleman, turnaround at your discretion. The surface is phenomenal, smooth asphalt with lots of places to stop for water refills or restroom breaks. The elevation profile is famously kind.
3. A late lunch on McEwan — the Whitehouse for a burger you already have opinions about, or the Mulberry Cafe if you want the Michigan Harvest salad.
4. Wander through Cardinal & Clover. Not every stop is for you. The point is that there are twelve of them under one roof.
5. Fudge or a scoop from McEwan Street Fudge.
6. Early dinner at Ruk Thai or the Evening Post; a pint at Four Leaf if the streetside seating has opened up.
7. Home before the light goes.

That sequence didn't fit inside two blocks in 2018. It does now.

The Rail Trail turns 25, which lands differently here

June 2026 marks the 25th anniversary of the Isabella County section of the Pere Marquette Rail Trail, which follows the Midland to Clare route of the old Flint and Pere Marquette Railroad. Most anniversaries of most trails are footnotes. This one matters locally because the Pere Marquette is recognized as one of twenty-five Rails to Trails Conservancy Hall of Fame trails in the US, and Clare is its western terminus. Being the endpoint of a Hall of Fame trail is a small thing that produces a large amount of summer foot traffic, and the anniversary year is a reasonable excuse to ride the sections you've been meaning to ride.

A few practical notes if you haven't been on it lately. Only Class 1 e-bikes are permitted; if the bike has a throttle, it's not permitted on the trail. The trail sustained significant damage and is currently undergoing repair in multiple locations, with closings and detours posted on the Friends of the Pere Marquette Rail Trail Facebook page. Check before you commit to a long-loop day.

For a shorter local ride, the City of Clare has been working on extending the trail to connect with a DNR trail that starts about two miles west of Clare and proceeds to Evart; a section was paved from just west of Clare through Farwell in 2009, and through the Village of Lake in 2010. West of town gets you into quieter riding almost immediately.

Shamrock Park, Pettit Park, and the fireworks question

The town's civic summer still hinges on two greenspaces. Summerfest is set for June 27, 2026, with a vendor and craft fair, food, and fireworks at Shamrock Park, which remains the single-day gathering where you'll run into people you haven't seen since March. If you'd rather host visiting family without hosting them at your house, Pettit Park camping is offered first-come, first-served with no reservations, open May 1 through November 1, at $25 for modern camping with electric and water and $20 for primitive. That's a useful lever when the guest room math gets awkward around the Fourth of July.

For something odder and quieter on the same June 27 weekend, the Clare County Airport summer fly-in runs 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. at 4457 N. Clare Avenue in Harrison. It's fifteen minutes north and reliably one of the more unusual mornings on offer.

The weekday texture

The stretch of summer that actually defines living here isn't the festival dates. It's the Tuesday grocery run and the Thursday evening pint. Two things worth flagging on that front.

First, on the grocery side, Double Up Food Bucks expanded effective May 1: shoppers can now earn up to $50 per day, more than double last year's $20 daily limit, and frozen fruits and vegetables with no added salt, sugar, or oil are now eligible. Witbeck's Family Foods at 1026 N McEwan Street is the closest place in town where that program moves real dollars for SNAP households. It is a quietly significant change for weekly grocery math in Clare, and it is not the kind of update that shows up on the front page of anyone's calendar.

Second, for produce and roadside fruit through the season, Tice's Farm Market at 11715 N Mission Rd is open daily from 9 a.m. to 7 p.m., which covers the "we forgot the sweet corn" run that a proper summer requires at least twice a week.

Downtown, the Doherty Hotel keeps doing what the Doherty does. Timeout Tavern's kitchen at 601 N McEwan runs late by Clare standards, closing at 11 on Fridays and Saturdays, which makes it the practical answer to "where do we go after the fireworks are over and the park is emptying out."

What summer here actually rewards

The claim under all of this is simple. Clare's summer isn't a destination weekend or a themed festival lineup. It's a functioning small-town main street with a Hall of Fame trail arriving at one end, a preserved historic block that quietly doubled its tenant list between 2022 and last summer, and a park calendar that still sets its watch by fireworks over Shamrock Lake. If you live here, the reward for paying attention this season is that the two blocks you already walk are worth walking more slowly than you did five years ago.

If you're thinking about what your own place on or near McEwan Street might be worth this summer, or you're eyeing a lot closer to the trailhead for a next chapter, the Daniella Bell Group knows this stretch of Clare County the way a longtime local does. Reach out when you're ready to find your beautiful life here.