A dam over an eight-foot waterfall made the lake at Vicksburg's heart

There was an eight-foot waterfall on Portage Creek, and in 1831 John Vickers decided to put it to work. He threw up a brush dam across the falls and built a log grist mill below it to grind the settlers’ grain. The dam did two things at once: it powered the mill, and it backed up the creek into a sizable pond. That pond is still there. It’s Sunset Lake, the body of water the whole village now wraps around.

People built homes and shops along the new lakeshore, and the settlement took the miller’s name — though not without a hitch. When it incorporated on October 18, 1871, the town was christened “Brady.” Exactly one day later a petition went around to change it, and Vicksburg it became. The east half of the village still sits in Brady Township and the west half in Schoolcraft Township, a line that runs right through town.

The water that made the place kept making it. By 1903 the Lee Paper Mill rose on the same creek, turning cotton rags into fine writing paper and becoming the town’s economic engine for generations. Long before that, a grist mill, a pond, and a willingness to dam a small falls were enough to start a town from nothing.

Today the lake is the centerpiece — boats in summer, ice in winter — and a few steps away the Vicksburg Historic Village keeps the rest of the story, eleven old buildings and some twenty thousand artifacts pulled from the years between the pioneers and the Depression. The falls are gone, drowned under the lake they helped create, which is a fitting end for a waterfall that built a town by being held back.