Rugg Pond: a power dam the county bought for a dollar

The lights in Kalkaska once came from a spot in the woods where the two branches of the Rapid River meet. In 1904 a man named Ambrose Palmer started the Kalkaska Light and Power Company and threw a dam across the river there, building a small hydroelectric plant behind it. Farmers are said to have hauled wagonloads of stone to pack the foundation. The pond that backed up behind the dam took the name Rugg Pond, and for decades the water spinning through that powerhouse kept the town and the country around it lit.

The plant changed hands the way old utilities do. Consumers Power picked it up in 1950, then turned around in 1953 and sold the whole thing to Kalkaska County for one dollar — a token price for a dam the company no longer wanted to run. The county held it, and the river kept flowing through, until 1980, when the Army Corps of Engineers condemned the aging structure.

That could have been the end of Rugg Pond. Instead, in 1982 a group of locals organized to save it, and the place was kept as a public natural area rather than drained and forgotten. Today you can walk down to the old dam site in Rapid River Township and stand where the powerhouse hummed, with the Rapid River — one of the cleanest, coldest trout streams in the region — sliding past below.

There’s a long-told story that a young Ernest Hemingway once fished here overnight from the powerhouse on his way north. Nobody can prove it. But it’s the kind of legend a quiet, river-cut place like this seems to attract, and standing at the dam at dusk, you understand why.