Beaver Island ArchiveA primary-source archive & encyclopedia45°40′N 85°33′W · Lake Michigan
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Road

West Side Drive

Draft — sources verified, prose evolving

Locator map: West Side Drive highlighted within the Beaver Island archipelago
Locator plate © OpenStreetMap contributors (ODbL 1.0); depths NOAA; names USGS GNIS. How the plates are drawn.
TypeRoad
Coordinates45.5941° N, 85.5950° WGoogle MapsDownload KML
WithinBeaver Island archipelago
ErasModern era
On this page
Locator map: West Side Drive highlighted within the Beaver Island archipelago
Locator plate © OpenStreetMap contributors (ODbL 1.0); depths NOAA; names USGS GNIS. How the plates are drawn.
Road
Intersects
Betsy Smith Trail · Little Iron Orebay Road · North French Bay Road · South End Road · South French Bay Road · West Side Road
Coordinates
45.5941° N, 85.5950° WGoogle MapsDownload KML
Eras
Modern era
Concepts
transportationtoponymy
Within
Beaver Island archipelago

Summary

West Side Drive is a named road on Beaver Island’s current OpenStreetMap map. The three held ways carrying that name are merged here into one route geometry of about 4.7 km. It meets six other named roads, listed under intersects_road.

Map: Beaver Island access and infrastructure.
West Side Drive runs along Beaver Island’s west shore; this island-scale plate shows it and the rest of the mapped road networkDrawn from the archive's own data in EPSG:3078. Map data © OpenStreetMap contributors (ODbL 1.0); PAD-US protected-area context and USGS 3DEP (public domain). · CC BY 4.0 for the drawing; underlying data under its own terms (see credit)

Evidence and limits

The name and the alignment are what mappers last entered, and OpenStreetMap is volunteered work rather than a survey: it settles neither the right-of-way nor who maintains the road. Where the name came from is a separate question. Plats, road-commission minutes, and island memory answer that one. Put an older spelling from any of them into alt_names or former_names, with the source that attests it.

Documented associations

These source-backed records provide context for the mapped route:

  • Beaver Islands State Wildlife Research Area — Beaver Islands State Wildlife Research Area is a Michigan Department of Natural Resources public-land designation covering substantial state-managed land in the Beaver Island archipelago, dating from the 1970s. Local reporting places 9,195.5 acres of the Beaver Island portion within the 2024…
  • Miller’s Marsh — Millers Marsh is a small named water body on the west side of Beaver Island, about 3.7 km (2.3 mi) west-northwest of Lake Geneserath and 16 km (10 mi) southwest of Saint James. GNIS classifies the feature as a “Lake” (feature 632348) at 45.612659° N, 85.5922152° W, but local usage…
  • West Side Drive 10.1-acre tract — An online Beaver Beacon listing offered 10.1 acres of hardwoods with 700 feet of frontage on West Side Drive, one mile north of Fox Lake. It described high ground, a private road, and a cleared building site and gave an asking price of $45,000. This record preserves the listing’s approximate location and advertised land characteristics. A current 10.3-acre…

Research status

The local newspaper and website corpus contains exact-name mentions in 43 file(s). Those files are research leads; the relation layer is added only when the surrounding source text establishes that the record involves this road.

Maps for this place

These Atlas plates provide regional context. They do not establish a precise boundary, current ownership, access right, operating status, or field condition.

  • EnvironmentSoils, wetlands, hydrography, and terrain
  • GeologyGeneralized geology and landforms
  • HydrologyMapped water and wetland context
  • AccessMapped routes, facilities, and protected areas
  • Land surveyPLSS geometry and historic GLO patent-location context

Sources

  1. Current mapped road name 'West Side Drive'; grouped OSM way ids: 1205118581, 17761831, 265424700. This is a volunteered map record, not a surveyed right-of-way or proof of historical naming.
    osm · roads

Added 2 August 2026. Recent changes

Cite this article

Beaver Island Archive, “West Side Drive”, https://beaverislandarchive.org/places/west-side-drive/, accessed [date], citing OpenStreetMap contributors, roads via Overpass API, retrieved 2026-08-01 (ODbL 1.0)..

Last revised 2026-08-02. Fill in [date] with the date you read it — this page is static and cannot know that.

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