Why a state park near Laingsburg is named Sleepy Hollow

The name came out of a stalemate. When the state carved a new park out of the farm country west of Laingsburg, several nearby towns each wanted it named after them, and none would back down. The tie-breaker came from an old deed: one of the people who had owned land here was named Crane. That surname pointed straight at Ichabod Crane, the jumpy schoolteacher in Washington Irving’s “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” — so the park became Sleepy Hollow, and the squabbling towns all lost equally.

The hollow itself is younger than the story it’s named for. At the park’s center is Lake Ovid, a 410-acre lake that didn’t exist until the 1970s, when the state dammed the Little Maple River and let the valley fill. The shallow, branching shoreline that resulted is good for the kind of fishing where you bring a chair: bluegill, crappie, largemouth bass, northern pike. Herons stalk the edges, which feels right for a place named after a bird.

The park spreads across more than 2,600 acres on the Shiawassee–Clinton county line, close enough to Lansing that it fills up on summer weekends. There’s a swimming beach, a campground, and a web of trails that double as cross-country ski routes once the snow sets in. Much of the surrounding land is left rough on purpose — old fields going back to brush and woods — so it pulls in deer hunters in November and birders the rest of the year.

It’s a working reminder that even a plain stretch of mid-Michigan farmland can end up wearing a name lifted from a ghost story, just because a man named Crane once held the title to a piece of it.