Manistee Courthouse Fountain

This is one of two cast-iron fountains installed in front of the Manistee County Courthouse in July 1887. Jonathan Moore and William Wilkinson of Brooklyn, New York, created the design. The fountains cost about $500 each. After a fire destroyed the courthouse in 1950, the Portage Lake Garden Club acquired this fountain and moved it to Onekama. Listed in the National Register of Historic Places, it is one of the few surviving nineteenth-century cast-iron courthouse fountains in Michigan.

[Back]: This fountain once stood in front of the Manistee County Courthouse. The Portage Lake Garden Club moved it here to Onekama Village Park in 1950. It was dedicated to the memory of the area’s veterans in 1951. In July 1973 the fountain’s statue of a merman riding on a dolphin disappeared. Seven months later, the county sheriff found the merman on his doorstep, accompanied by a typewritten note that read, “Sorry, this is the only way we [k]new to return it. Thank you.”