Three rivers are born in Springfield Township

Springfield Township is named for its springs, and that’s not just a pretty word — three full-grown Michigan rivers begin inside its borders, then go their separate ways to three different Great Lakes. It’s a rare bit of geography: the high, wet ground where the water hasn’t decided yet which way to fall.

The Huron River starts near Big Lake, down where Scott and Big Lake roads cross in the south of the township, and runs south through Ann Arbor before emptying into Lake Erie. The Shiawassee begins at almost the same spot, but heads the opposite direction — north and west, eventually reaching Saginaw Bay and Lake Huron. And the main branch of the Clinton River rises in the township’s northeast corner and flows southeast to Lake St. Clair. Same patch of marshy upland, three different destinations hundreds of miles apart.

The best place to stand in that landscape is Indian Springs Metropark, on the township’s edge northwest of Pontiac. It was set aside in the early 1980s to protect the last big stretch of the Huron Swamp — the spongy, springy headwaters where the Huron River is still just seeping out of the ground. Today it’s more than 2,000 acres of woods, wetland, and restored prairie, with miles of paved and dirt trail, a golf course, and an Environmental Discovery Center built to explain exactly how a swamp turns into a river.

It’s easy to think of a river as a thing that exists fully grown, rolling past a city. Out here you can see the other end of it — the trickle, the seep, the wet woods where it all starts. Springfield Township is the unglamorous, soggy birthplace of three of them at once.