No Cottage on This Lake

For the most part, the names of small lakes around here are amazingly uncreative. I suppose that's to be expected when we have so many of them. When you have more lakes than names, that means you end up with a lot of names used more than once.

The lake nearest my home-- within sight of it, in fact, when the leaves are off the trees in winter-- has an original Native American name. Unfortunately, it's the original Native American name of a lake in New York State. Lake and county share the name, but the town with the same name is hundreds of miles away.

Then we have lakes named after people. Higgins, Houghton, Fowler, and so on.

But most lakes are named after some feature they have. And since small lakes are pretty much the same, we end up with lots of Sand, Mud, Grass, Big, Small, West, East, North, South, Center, Tee, Ell, Elbow, Twin, Round, and Square Lakes. Carp, Pickerel, and Perch Lakes. Duck, Goose, and Loon Lakes. Blue, Green, Clear, and Silver Lakes.

Then there are Nine Lakes, or Fifteen Lakes, or what have you, named not for their number but for their section. (For those not from here, the land is surveyed in "townships" six miles by six, each split into 36 numbered sections, each approximately one mile square. Not perfectly square, of course, because after all the Earth is not flat, except to certain politicians.)

Indian lake names, we have a lot of those too. As opposed to Native American. These are vaguely obscene-sounding things like Lake Ne-Wa-Sha-Ho-Mo. If you ask where the name came from, they'll tell you some "ancient Indian legend" about some princess and a birch-bark canoe, but the truth is the name was assembled from the names of the grandkids of some sleazy developer back in 1948.

But one name that intrigued me was Tar Lake. Tar Lake showed up on the maps as a little body of water just south of Mancelona; in the settlement of Antrim, in fact, an even smaller town at Mancelona's south end, a town that inexplicably maintained its own separate identity.

Tar Lake. An odd name. How did anybody come up with that?

The answer is simple. Tar Lake really was a lake of tar. Acres of tar, tens of feet deep.

You see, at one point this area was industrial. There was a time when heavy hauling meant ships, and for that sort of transportation northern Michigan was uniquely well-suited.

We had any number of iron mills (one of which survives today, in East Jordan, making "street iron;" you might have seen its name cast into a manhole cover or fire hydrant). At that time the only way to make highest-quality iron was with charcoal. Coal had too many impurities. So the biggest resource to transport was the hardwood for the charcoal. It was easier to ship the iron ore to the hardwood forests than to do it the other way around, so that's what people did.

In 1886, the Antrim Iron Company built a company town at the south end of Mancelona. They made charcoal in mass quantities. Baking wood to make charcoal produced a lot of wood tar. The wood tar went out a pipe and into a glacial kettle in the ground. The kettle filled with tar. It filled completely. Acres of tar, insanely deep.

When the company ceased operations in 1945, they just left the tar there. And so it sat for decades. Occasionally vandals would set it on fire, but it didn't really burn well. So it persisted, slowly tainting the groundwater further and further away.

Eventually it became a Superfund site. The Feds came in and actually cleaned the mess up, as best as it could be cleaned. Tar Lake is empty now, and surrounded by a wire-mesh fence topped with barbed wire and studded with warning signs. The Feds maintain a meteorological station there, for some unknown reason.

I don't know if this part is true. It is a fact that the Antrim company persisted for some decades after they ceased operations in Antrim County. They were into oil and gas, and they had large amounts of land. Supposedly, when the Feds went after the Potentially Responsible Parties for the Tar Lake clean-up, they ended up getting a big chunk of money from a company best known for producing films and TV shows. Such are the insane ways corporations intermesh and inherit assets and liabilities from each other.

Tar Lake is gone now, and good riddance. I think about it from time to time, though, whenever I hear some tourist obsessing about the Pristene Northwoods and how they don't want them ruined by industrial development. I respect that sentiment, but it's a little late to worry about that now. This whole area has been ravaged and abandoned again, and again, and again, for the benefit of people far, far away.

It's still happening. There's nothing new about it at all.