The banners are still zip-tied to the lampposts on North Paw Paw Street this week, left over from a festival that closed most of downtown Coloma for two days and drew a crowd bigger than the town's year-round population several times over. By Monday the folding chairs were gone from the curb, the drone show equipment had been packed into a trailer, and the peach pit spit contest lines had dissolved back into ordinary sidewalk traffic. If you live on or near Paw Paw Lake, you already know this rhythm. What you might not have clocked is that the festival, for all its noise, isn't actually the best few days of a Coloma summer. Those come next.
What Just Happened, Briefly
This year's Glad-Peach Festival ran Friday, July 31 through Saturday, August 1, with the theme "Peaches Through the Decades." Friday brought a car show, the crowning of the Glad Peach prince and princess, a set from PS Dump Your Boyfriend on the Leonard Stage, and a 10:30 p.m. drone show. Saturday stacked a 5K run and walk, the noon parade, line dancing with the Sunset Coast Dancers, a set from Jared Knox and the Hagar Bombs, and fireworks timed for 10:30 p.m. Festival president Jen Schreier told a local radio station ahead of the weekend that last year's event drew more than 14,000 people, and that organizers were hoping for even more this year.
Ask festival literature how old the event is and you'll get 1947 or '48. Ask Schreier over the phone and she'll tell you it started in 1967. Nobody in town seems especially bothered by the discrepancy, which tells you something about how this festival functions here. It isn't treated as a tourism product. It's the town's own record of itself, and the exact founding year matters less than the fact that, as Schreier put it, "we thrive on agriculture. It's what built this town."
What the Lake Used to Hold
Here's the part that surprises people who assume Paw Paw Lake has always looked the way it looks now. In the 1940s, during what locals call the lake's hayday, its shoreline was lined with dozens of hotels, restaurants, and dance halls. Paw Paw Lake was, for a stretch of decades, one of the busier resort destinations in southwest Michigan, packed with places to eat, drink, and dance within sight of the water.
That era has thinned out to a single business. The Waterfront Restaurant and Club Rocadero, open on the lake since the 1940s, describes itself as the last restaurant and bar remaining directly on Paw Paw Lake, still family-owned and operated. It keeps six docks for boaters, a lakeside patio open from spring through early fall, and a Sunday brunch alongside a menu built around steak, seafood, and pasta.
| 1940s Paw Paw Lake | Paw Paw Lake today | |
|---|---|---|
| Restaurants and bars directly on the water | Dozens, spread across the shoreline | One: The Waterfront Restaurant & Club Rocadero |
| Character | Resort strip, dance halls, hotel rows | Quiet residential shoreline, docks, private beaches |
That contraction can read like decline if you only look at the water's edge. It isn't. The scene didn't disappear. It moved a few blocks inland.
Where Dinner Actually Happens Now
If The Waterfront is the last holdout of the old lakefront strip, the current dining energy along Paw Paw Lake Road belongs to a different kind of place. Bend, run by owner Lonna, has built a following on fried chicken and burger-night specials, with karaoke nights that draw a regular crowd rather than tourists passing through. Eddie's Drive-In, a longtime fixture nearby, is the spot locals point to for ribs and a BBQ sauce that gets its own mention in nearly every review.
Neither has a dock or a water view. Both are a short drive from the shoreline rather than sitting on it. That's the actual shape of Coloma's food scene in 2026: one legacy restaurant still holding the water's edge, and a cluster of smaller, personality-driven spots doing the daily work a few streets back. If you're new to the area and only look for lakefront dining, you'll find one option. If you ask a neighbor where they actually eat on a Tuesday, you'll get a different answer entirely.
The Weeks Nobody Markets
The festival gets the drone show and the write-ups. The two or three weeks after it, running through Labor Day, are when the lake is actually usable by the people who live around it, without festival traffic clogging the downtown grid or out-of-town cars filling every side street.
A few things are still running right now that make late August worth paying attention to:
- Jollay Orchards, picking fruit for more than 160 years, keeps its Summer Jamboree going through the end of August.
- Fruit Acres Farm Market and U-Pick, open since June with strawberries, shifts into cherries, peaches, and apples as the season goes, with free tractor rides running August through October.
- The Paw Paw Lake Yacht Club runs more than 50 events a season, including a Concert on the Lawn and weekly Thursday games of bags and cards, several of which are open to the public rather than members only.
- Helen St. Beach, the small sandy public beach and boat launch on Little Paw Paw Lake maintained by Coloma Township, goes back to being genuinely quiet once the festival crowd clears out of downtown.
For an evening that isn't about food at all, the Loma Theatre downtown has been showing first-run films on three screens since 1964, and Randall Park's Norma Jean Somers Splash Pad still has weeks of warm weather left for anyone with kids to wear out. If you want a slower afternoon, the three stops on the region's Makers Trail closest to town, Contessa Wine Cellars, Filkins Vineyards, and Moonrise Winery, are all a short drive away and considerably less crowded now than they were the weekend before last.
The Real Argument
None of this is a knock on Glad-Peach. A festival that has run since the late 1940s, or 1967, depending on who you ask, and still pulls five figures of attendance is doing something right, and it remains the biggest weekend on Coloma's calendar for a reason. But treating it as the whole story misses the more interesting fact underneath: a lake that lost dozens of restaurants over eighty years didn't lose its social life. It relocated a few streets inland, spread itself across a longer stretch of the calendar, and quieted down just enough that the people who actually live here get the better version of August once the visitors head home.
If you're weighing what it's like to actually live around Paw Paw Lake year-round, not just visit it for a festival weekend, that's the kind of detail worth knowing before you make a decision either way. Andrea Hook-Graham has spent years working buyers and sellers through Coloma and the rest of southwest Michigan's lake communities, and is always glad to talk through what a specific stretch of shoreline or a specific season actually looks like day to day. Let's Connect.
