The Allegan-County dam that lit Kalamazoo from 24 miles away

In 1899, a streetlight blinked on in Kalamazoo, and the power that lit it had traveled almost a full day’s wagon ride to get there. It came from a dam on the Kalamazoo River out in Trowbridge Township, southeast of Allegan — and the wire that carried it was the first long-distance, high-voltage transmission line in Michigan.

The man behind it was William Foote, who with his brother James was busy buying up and stitching together little electric companies all over southern Michigan. Most power plants of the day sat right next to the town they served, because nobody believed electricity could travel far without bleeding away. The Footes bet otherwise. They built the Trowbridge Dam in 1898 and ran a 22,000-volt line about 24 miles to Kalamazoo to power its new streetlights. At the time, sending power that far was close to unheard of, and it worked. That bet grew into the company we now call Consumers Energy.

The dam ran for over a century. But the same century that made the river an industrial workhorse left a poison behind: the stretch of the Kalamazoo below the paper mills is laced with PCBs, and the sediment piled up behind Trowbridge held a load of it. A dam failure could have flushed that contamination downstream all at once, so the state named Trowbridge its top-priority dam-removal job and, starting in 2019, began tearing it out and digging the bad sediment from the riverbed.

So the place where Michigan first proved electricity could travel is being unbuilt on purpose — the powerhouse already demolished, the river being coaxed back toward something a paddler or a fish would recognize. It is a strange kind of monument: the spot that wired the future is now being returned to water.