A lumber-camp dam that became a 2,500-acre hunting ground

Murphy Lake started out as three little lakes strung together by a creek. In the 1850s, loggers threw a dam across Goodings Creek — part of the Cass River system — to pool the water deep enough to float their pine downstream, and the backup swallowed the small lakes into one. The lumber is long gone. The lake the loggers made is still there, and so is the wide stretch of state land that grew up around it a few miles east of Millington.

The Murphy Lake State Game Area runs to roughly 2,500 acres of woods, marsh, brushy old fields, and a handful of lakes — Murphy itself plus Cedar, Hart, North, Otter, and a couple of others with good names like Powder Horn. The state manages it for wildlife, which is a polite way of saying it’s a hunting ground: deer in the timber, ducks on the water, small game in the cover. A second dam in the early 1930s raised the lake again to about what you see today.

For people who’d rather carry binoculars than a shotgun, it works just as well. The mix of water and woods pulls in the kind of birds you don’t see from a back porch, and there are quiet two-tracks to walk. Anglers do fine here too — the lake holds bluegill, crappie, largemouth bass, walleye, and northern pike, and the state stocks and surveys it like the working fishery it is.

The thing worth holding onto is the layering. The shape of this place — where the water sits, how deep it runs — was set by men who never meant to make a park. They wanted to move logs to a mill. They left behind a lake, and the lake drew the game, and the game drew the state, and now it’s public land you can wander on a Saturday with nobody to answer to but the deer.