Diamond Lake's island, and the barge that serves it

There is an island in the middle of Diamond Lake, just southeast of Cassopolis, and people live on it — about 43 acres of homes sitting in open water with no bridge to the mainland. In summer the only way across is a privately owned barge that ferries residents and their cars back and forth; come winter, when the ferry stops, islanders cross on the ice or simply don’t. It is the kind of arrangement that sounds invented until you see the barge actually loaded with a pickup truck and pushing off.

At 1,078 acres, Diamond is the largest lake in Cass County. The glaciers made it — meltwater pooling here at the close of the last Ice Age — and it’s fed by springs rather than a big inflowing river, which keeps the water clear. Roughly 60 percent of it is under ten feet deep, a broad sunny shallows that drops away to about 64 feet at the deepest hole, so it fishes well for bass and bluegill up top and colder species down low. Four townships — Calvin, Jefferson, LaGrange, and Penn — all reach a corner into the same water, which tells you the lake was here long before anybody drew the lines on a map.

The shoreline is nearly solid cottages now, more than 900 of them, because Diamond was a vacation lake before most people in the region had ever taken a vacation. Mishawaka families used to spend most of a day getting here by horse and buggy just to sit by it. The buggies are gone and the houses are year-round now, but the basic appeal hasn’t moved an inch: clear glacial water, a long warm shallows, and out in the middle of it, an island you can only reach if somebody fires up the barge.