They took out the Shiatown Dam, and the Shiawassee runs free again

For 180 years the Shiawassee River piled up behind a wall at Shiatown, a little spot in the woods northwest of Vernon. The first dam went in back in 1840 to run a mill. In 1904 it was rebuilt as a hydroelectric dam, and Consumers Power ran it for electricity until 1955. The pond it backed up became a place to swim and race hydroplanes; the county took it over in 1965 and built a park around it.

But a dam is a patient kind of danger. The Shiatown structure survived floods in 1974, 1981, and 2001 that nearly broke it, and the churning water below the apron drowned at least five people over the years. By 1999 the dam had reverted to the state for unpaid taxes, aging and unwanted. In 2010 the order came down: fix it or take it out.

They took it out. Working with the Friends of the Shiawassee River and a string of state and federal grants, crews lowered the dam in phases starting in 2012, then restored the riverbed and the banks. By the fall of 2019 the job was substantially done — the wall gone, the old millpond drained back to a river channel, and fish able to swim straight up the Shiawassee for the first time in generations.

What’s left is better than what was lost. The Shiatown Dam Park spreads across about 100 acres on both sides of the river, woods and restored prairie and wetland, with picnic pavilions, trails, and a canoe launch on the east bank. The water that used to sit dead behind the dam now slides past in a clean, free-flowing run — one of the prettiest paddling stretches in the county, on a river that finally got to be a river again.