Protecting the Crystal River’s manmade history

Glen Arbor Sun

Dr. Chuck Olson is on a mission to protect historic structures in the Crystal River. Ever since he and his wife Connie acquired a seasonal home on the river just off County Road 675 northeast of Glen Arbor 20 years ago, the former professor at the University of Michigan School of Natural Resources and former trustee at The Leelanau School has watched historic, manmade structures disappear at an alarming rate. He thinks the culprits are unknowing canoers and kayakers, or the flood of new homeowners on the river who, understandably, believe they are doing a service when they remove hazardous, nail-filled boards for the benefit of future recreation or clean up the river in front of their property.

Glen Arbor boasts two commercial canoe and kayak liveries and a surge of new homes, especially in the Woodstone neighborhood, between 675 and the east end of town, where the Crystal River flows southwest before reversing its direction and emptying into Lake Michigan at The Homestead resort. Not surprisingly, the growth in our area since Olson arrived (he and Connie still spend most of their time in Ann Arbor) has collided with efforts to preserve nature and local history.

“Whoever was doing this was not thinking about it from an historical perspective, or that it might be a violation of existing laws,” Olson guesses.

The structures Dr. Olson pointed out to the Glen Arbor Sun during a canoe trip in mid-June are either remnants of manmade fish sanctuaries — logs or stumps nailed onto much older water control structures in the early twentieth century by Trout Unlimited and the Michigan Department of Natural Resources (DNR) to create fish habitat in the river — or the remains of water wheels from before 1900 that early settlers used to irrigate cranberry fields in the bogs and low swales just east of the river.

In any case, the fish habitat features and the waterwheels are both protected, in principle, under state law and may not be legally removed without a permit from the Department of Environment Quality (DEQ). Olson believes that the structures dating from the 1880s may also be covered under the Federal Antiquities Act.

Though Olson originally thought the DNR held jurisdiction over historic objects in the river, the Department’s conservation agent for Leelanau County, Mike Borkovich, yielded to the DEQ. According to John Arevalo, the DEQ’s Cadillac District Supervisor for the Land and Water Management Division, one needs a permit to place new structures on the bottomland, to excavate or to build a dam — but that rule envisions larger projects that involve heavy equipment. “Someone could easily use their bare hands to remove a structure,” says Arevalo. “Technically, someone drifting by in a boat would need the permission of the structure’s riparian owner to remove it. But the reality is that we have a limited staff and a limited budget. Normally, if there really isn’t a large impact … and if it was impeding navigation … you could probably just remove it.”

Dr. Olson doesn’t necessarily expect government help to preserve the structures in the Crystal River. His primary goal is to inform local residents and canoers that these objects are relics of history, and deserve respect. He appeals to aerial photographs from 1952 for evidence of cranberry bogs, which he believes were once commercially farmed by Native Americans. “That’s why I like aerial photos,” he says. “Some say a photo never lies, but it never tells the whole truth either. A photo only answers the questions you’re asking.”

Local history guru John Tobin corroborates his belief that water control structures there were temporarily designed to transport water over the ridge to grow cranberries, especially when the river was low. Olson believes that the previous owner of his home, Jack Russell, wanted a fish farm on the east side of the ridge and that he paid a contractor and heavy equipment operator named Martin Egeler to dig a pond and use wooden conduits to channel water away from the river before the DNR stopped him.

Olson found a hollowed-out, split cedar conduit on his land in 1989 that may have been connected years ago to a water wheel. He’s also found numerous nails in the river structures — rough and square, clearly forged by a blacksmith — that he believes date back to the 1880s.

Dr. Olson has also been instrumental in initiating other endeavors to promote local history. Through his friendship with Guy Meadows, a professor of naval architecture and marine engineering, and director of the ocean engineering laboratory at the University of Michigan, they brought the M-Rover submarine to Big Glen Lake in the early summer of 2003 to search the depths for the remains of a steamboat called the Rescue, which captain John Dorsey allegedly sank intentionally in 1914 under mysterious circumstances that prompted a community-wide debate and search four years ago. Read about the search for the Rescue on our website at http://www.glenarborsun.com/archives/2003/06/dorseys_sunken.html.