Cooke Dam: the first of six powerhouses on the lower Au Sable

A century ago, the Au Sable River ran free from the lakes near Grayling all the way to Lake Huron. Then, in December 1911, the water hit a wall of concrete and started making electricity. That was Cooke Dam, the first of six hydroelectric plants strung along the lower Au Sable, and it changed the river for good.

The man behind it was William Foote, who with his brother James had built Consumers Power Company. Foote had eyed the Au Sable for years as a place to make power, but couldn’t line up the money until 1909. The site itself was the idea of an Andrew Cooke, a banker who helped raise the financing and got the dam named after him for his trouble. Crews ran a big construction camp in the woods, diverted the river, poured the foundation by mid-1910, and switched the plant on the next year.

What made Cooke a marvel wasn’t just the dam — it was the wire. The plant pushed electricity 125 miles to Flint over a line carrying 140,000 volts, a world record for the time. Out here in the empty pine country, men were generating power for factory towns most of them would never see.

Cooke was only the start. Over the next dozen years Consumers built Five Channels, Loud, Foote, and the rest, six plants in all, turning long stretches of the river into still ponds backed up behind concrete. The dams are still running today, now under new ownership, and their backwaters are a big part of why people fish, paddle, and camp along the River Road Scenic Byway.

Pull over at one of the overlooks and you can see both Au Sables at once: the wide flat pond above the dam, and the quick narrow river below it, hurrying off toward the lake the way it always did.