Sylvan Lake: the little city named for a 'wooded shady lake'

An 1818 expedition led by Reverend John Monteith came over the hills northwest of Detroit and found a chain of small lakes laced into the woods. The prettiest one wore a ring of tamarack trees around its shore, so they called it Timber Lake. The name didn’t stick. Somewhere along the way people swapped it for something softer — Sylvan, from the old word for “of the forest” — and the lake, and eventually the town, became Sylvan Lake.

This is a genuinely tiny place. At about half a square mile, Sylvan Lake is one of the smallest cities by land area in all of Michigan, a single neighborhood wrapped around its namesake water. It grew up the way a lot of Oakland County lake towns did: as a summer escape. Once the trolleys and then the automobiles reached out here in the late 1800s and early 1900s, Detroiters came to splash at Tower Beach, ride water slides, picnic, and fish, then trundle home. Some of them liked it enough to stay.

The community organized itself into a village in 1921, with Henry Stickle as its first president, and in February 1947 it stepped up to become the City of Sylvan Lake, with Leo Donaldson sworn in as the first mayor. By then the cottages were turning into year-round homes and the summer crowd was becoming neighbors.

The city long ago adopted a slogan that tells you exactly how it sees itself: “The Prettiest Little City in the State of Michigan.” That’s a lot of confidence for half a square mile. Stand on the shore at dusk, with the houses crowding right down to the water and the lake going copper in the last light, and you can see how they earned the nerve to say it.