Hamlin Lake and the town that washed away

Hamlin Lake, just inland from Ludington State Park, is the biggest man-made lake in all of Michigan, stretching about a dozen miles with some 5,000 acres of water. But it wasn’t always here. Not so long ago this was just a small lake and a fast little river running to Lake Michigan, until a lumber baron named Charles Mears saw a chance to put it to work.

In the 1850s Mears dammed the Big Sable River to back up a pond where logs could float to his sawmill, and a busy little town grew up around it. He named the town and the lake Hamlin, after the man he hoped would become vice president, Hannibal Hamlin, and named a nearby settlement Lincoln to match. For a while it boomed. Then in 1888 the dam gave way: a wall of water and close to a million feet of stacked lumber came roaring down the river, smashing through the town and out into Lake Michigan. They rebuilt, but the dam failed a second time, and the town never truly recovered. When the state park was created, the last buildings came down, and today only a cemetery and a few crumbling ruins mark the place.

The dam standing now, built around 1914, isn’t for logging anymore. It just holds back one of the loveliest lakes in the state. People come from all over to boat, fish, swim, and paddle its quiet upper waters — most of them never guessing that a whole lost town helped make it.