Belleville Lake: the reservoir that drowned a village in 1925

Belleville Lake runs for miles through Van Buren Township, fringed with docks and lakeside lawns and boat launches, looking for all the world like it was always here. It wasn’t. The lake is barely a century old, and there’s a village underneath it.

It came down to a river and a power company. Around 1910 the firm that would become Detroit Edison started quietly buying up Huron River frontage for a hydroelectric plant. The French Landing Dam and its powerhouse were finished in 1925, and when the gates swung shut, the river had nowhere to go but up and out. It crept across the low ground for weeks, swallowing fields and roads and a good piece of the old village of Rawsonville, which had stood along the riverbank. Some buildings got jacked up and dragged to higher ground. The rest just went under and stayed there.

For a while people even called the new water Edison Lake, after the company that made it. Detroit Edison eventually handed the dam over to Van Buren Township, which restored it; the dam and powerhouse are a recognized Michigan historic site now, with a marker to prove it.

These days the lake is all bass boats and fishing lines and kids off the end of a dock on a hot afternoon. It’s worth knowing, when you’re out there, what you’re floating over. Somewhere down in that green water are the streets of Rawsonville, a whole village that traded daylight for the bottom of a reservoir in the summer of 1925.