The camp office and store, cookhouse and mess hall, and two bunkhouses are the only surviving structures of a once large logging camp that the Van Platen–Fox Lumber Company built along the western shore of Golden Lake in 1921. It operated until 1935. The one-story, wood-frame camp buildings rest on concrete blocks and are finished with vertical pine plank siding. Headquartered in Iron Mountain, with extensive lumbering operations in the western Upper Peninsula and northern Wisconsin, the Van Platen–Fox Lumber Company acquired property, put up a camp, and began harvesting hardwoods around Golden Lake in 1921. The Chicago and North Western Railroad transported the logs from Basswood, 2.5 miles to the northeast, to lumber mills in Crystal Falls, Menominee, and points south. Since 1937 the University of Michigan has used the site as a summer training camp for its forestry students, adding classroom buildings and log cabins.