Portage Lake
The Farmhouse sits on a bluff overlooking the south shore of Portage Lake. I am pretty sure the bluff is the old shoreline of Portage Lake when its high-water mark was about 40 feet higher than it is now, some ten thousand years ago when it wasn’t even a separate lake, in fact, but part of Lake Michigan. The Lake Michigan shoreline would have looked somewhat different then, but not as dramatically different as Lake Huron’s on the east side of the state, which would have swallowed up present-day Saginaw and Frankenmuth. Ten millennia ago, the mitten would’ve looked more like a hand curled into a “C.”
Over the millennia Lake Michigan has dropped to its current level of around 580 feet above sea level, leaving Portage Lake landlocked and eventually about 12 feet higher than the big lake. It drained into Lake Michigan via a small creek that by the mid 19th century was straddled by a lumbermill. The owners of the mill dammed the creek to manage the flow of water, thereby raising and lowering the level of Portage Lake by a couple of feet for everyone else. The land east of Portage Lake is flat enough that a couple of feet is the difference between dry and flooded for a few thousand acres of farmland. After fruitless efforts (and a few failed lawsuits) designed to get the lumbermill to behave in a neighborly manner, the residents surrounding Portage Lake decided to take matters into their own hands.
The story is famous. In 1871, working only with hand tools, a group of farmers spent several weeks hacking out a trench a few feet deep and wide where Portage Lake comes closest to Lake Michigan. Their intention was to fight back against the lumbermill: if the mill tried to raise the lake level, then they would remove a few logs from the mouth of their trench and allow the lake to lower itself again. As the story goes, they finished the trench, had a party, then pulled out their dam of logs, at which point 26,000 acre-feet of suddenly released water blasted out a channel two hundred feet wide, rendering moot the question of who was going to manage the lake level from that point on. Schooner captains gave the channel wide berth for a year or two until the debris settled to the bottom.
What ruined the sawmill, though, gave new life to the communities around the lake. The federal government dredged the channel to a uniform depth, after which Portage Lake became the only foul weather harbor of refuge between Ludington and South Manitou Island. Soon steamships full of vacationers were vying for space with the lumber schooners as they made Portage Lake a summer stopping point.
Sitting on the Farmhouse porch, looking out over the lake, I like to imagine what it would’ve looked like back then to see a couple of tall ships at anchor just across the road. The channel itself is about 2/3 of a mile west of us. I hope to have some cedar trees removed soon from our portion of the bluff soon to give us a better view.
This part of Michigan has been a destination for vacationers and those seeking a summer home for almost as long as the channel has existed – recreation took over from lumbering a long time ago. The Portage Point Resort, just north of the channel, was built for the influx of tourists around the same time as the Farmhouse. I think the Farmhouse itself was always someone’s second home, possibly a hobby fruit farm in its early days, though I’m still trying to figure that out. It’s nice to think we are here to add our footnote of history to its existence.