Croton: the little dam that sent power farther than anyone had before

Engineers from Russia, England, France, Italy, Japan, and India came all the way to a wide spot on the Muskegon River in 1907 to look at a power plant. The plant is still there, at Croton, churning away east of Newaygo, and it is the reason a quiet stretch of river earned a footnote in the history of electricity.

Built in the summer of 1907 by the Grand Rapids–Muskegon Power Company — an ancestor of today’s Consumers Energy — Croton was the first plant anywhere to push current down a line at more than 110,000 volts. That was the trick everyone wanted to see. Sending power that high meant you could send it far, and far meant a dam out in the woods could light up cities that were never going to grow up next to a river. The 60-some miles of line running south toward Grand Rapids was, at the moment it went live, the highest-voltage transmission in the world.

The dam itself is no monster. It stands about 40 feet high and holds back a reservoir of a little over 1,200 acres — modest next to Hardy Dam upriver, which came along in 1931. What made Croton famous was never its size. It was the wiring.

The plant ran through the whole twentieth century and into this one, which is its own kind of remarkable for machinery built before most people owned a car. It landed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1979, and the state put up a green-and-gold marker telling the voltage story. Stand on the road below the powerhouse today and you can still hear the water working, doing in 2026 exactly the job it was wired up to do when Theodore Roosevelt was president.