The River Raisin starts in a Lenawee County field

The river that flows through Monroe and pours into Lake Erie is born up here, in a quiet field in the Irish Hills. State biologists put the start of the River Raisin’s main stem in Section 27 of Woodstock Township, in the high western corner of Lenawee County, about 1,050 feet above sea level. From that unremarkable spot it heads off on a roughly 150-mile journey to the lake.

The Irish Hills make a good cradle for a river. The same ridge of glacial hills that holds the lakes and the old roadside towers sits high enough to send water running in several directions — a soft divide where the headwaters of more than one river system begin. The Raisin takes the southeast route, winding through moraine country and then flattening out across the farm plain toward Monroe.

It is famously crooked. The early French called it the Rivière aux Raisins for the wild grapes along its banks, and the name stuck even as the water curled back on itself again and again. Over its whole length the river drops only about 480 feet — gentle for that distance, which is part of why it loops so much.

By the time it reaches Lake Erie it has gathered nearly the whole of Lenawee County’s runoff. But all of that starts small, in a Woodstock Township field where the ground is just a little higher than everything around it, and the first trickle decides to head for the lake.