Diggin’ the Chain of Lakes

About a century ago, most of the land around the lakes was owned by cement factories. There were four cement factories in Branch County by 1900, including Union City Peerless, Bronson Portland, Coldwater Portland and Quincy Wolverine Portland. The lakes were not the beautiful, cottage-lined view you see today. Back then, it was a swampy wasteland in which no one would have dreamed of living. The county contained numerous swampy lowlands, rivers and lakes.

These watery areas formed a material called marl. (Marl is the grayish, mucky matter that you find your feet sinking into along the lakes.) The marl was dug from these lowlands, put onto barges and moved to the cement factories. Once at the factory, the marl was mixed with clay, of which Branch County also had an abundance. The mixture would then be dried, rolled into a fine powder and bagged for commercial and consumer use. The marl was even used in between the logs of log homes built during that time.

The great news is that the digging for marl cleaned up the land and made it better for everyone. By necessity, the cement factories dug out the rivers with a twofold purpose: Get marl out and make the rivers deeper for tugboats to travel to find more marl. This digging eventually linked the chain of lakes. Small tugs and other boats could navigate the chain of lakes, as they were now connected better with deeper waterways.

Tugboats pulled barges full of marl to the cement factories until the late 1930s and early 1940s. And quite by accident, the deeper rivers/channels drained the low swampland, and lake edges became more well-defined. The drained land became more useable for farming and for building. Now, the lakes offer clean, natural beauty to the many communities that have been built up around them and offer a better place for lakers, boaters and water sports. Who would’ve guessed that 100 years later, we would be able to enjoy what was once just a swampy, lowland?

Questions/Comments? Randall Hazelbaker is a local historian who has published three books through Arcadia Publishing. You can reach him at rhazelbaker@countyofbranch.com.