Oakland County — Buried in the urban sprawl north of Detroit, where Rochester Hills blends into Shelby Township, you can find a fascinating piece of Michigan’s history frozen in time.
A canal that was dug almost 200 years ago in an effort to cross the state is still there, hidden in the woods, and it’s been mostly untouched since. You just need to know where to look.
Back in 1837, when Michigan became a state, we had a governor named Stevens T. Mason who was all of 25 years old. One of the Boy Governor’s top priorities was to cut through the wilderness and connect the east and west sides of the new state with railroads and canals.
Gov. Mason was fascinated with New York’s Erie Canal, which had been built a few years earlier to connect Lake Erie with the Hudson River, so when Michigan became a state, one of the governor’s first big initiatives was to build a big canal of our own.
Mason’s canal would be called the Clinton-Kalamazoo Canal, and it would connect the Clinton River and Lake St. Clair in the east with the Kalamazoo River and Lake Michigan in the west. It would have to be dug by hand by men using only shovels and wheelbarrows, and it would take a decade or more to complete it.
But once the Clinton-Kalamazoo Canal was finished, it would allow ships and boats to cross directly across the State of Michigan. A barge carrying lumber or grain could travel from Chicago to Toledo in a fraction of the time it would have taken to sail up and around the Straits of Mackinac.
Gov. Stevens T. Mason had a grandiose plan, to be sure. And it ended up being one of the most grandiose failures in the state’s history.
The Clinton-Kalamazoo Canal was supposed to be 216 miles long, but only about 16 miles of it were built. Construction began in 1838 in Mt. Clemens and ended in 1843 when the funding ran dry. Most of the men who were working on it just stole the tools and shovels and went home. Some were so ticked off that they destroyed parts of the canal.
But here’s the cool part: Despite the decades and decades of development and urban sprawl that have overwhelmed Detroit’s northern suburbs, several miles of the canal have somehow—remarkably—survived. Most of the 16 miles of canal have been filled in and paved over, but good chunks of it are still intact.
And it looks pretty much the same way it would have looked in the early 1840s. Straight as an arrow, trees on either side, filled with mucky water. It’s a piece of Michigan history that is literally frozen in time half the year. Almost 200 years after the first shovel of dirt was removed, the Clinton-Kalamazoo Canal lives on.
If you want to step back in time, one of the best places to see the canal is in Holland Ponds Park in Shelby Township. Park your car and you’ll see a trailhead adjacent to the parking lot. As you walk down the trail, you’ll notice what appears to be a big drainage ditch on your right. That’s the Clinton-Kalamazoo Canal.
The other must-see spot is at the Yates Cider Mill in Rochester Hills. Across the street from the cider mill is a park that has a river next to it. You’ll see a bunch of busted-up pieces of concrete and metal in the river. Those are the remains of an aqueduct for the canal.
If you want to impress your friends and family as you’re walking along the canal trail, here are a few more historical details you can throw at them.
Back in 1838, as soon as Gov. Mason got permission from the legislature to borrow money for the canal, they started work on it. The Detroit Daily Free Press hailed it as a monumental event. “No public improvement in this State is more important than this canal, which connects, by an easy and direct route, our waters with those of Lake Michigan,” the Free Press wrote.
The canal would start in the east at Mt. Clemens and then wind its way through Utica, Rochester, Pontiac, Howell, and Hastings before meeting up with the Kalamazoo River. From there, it would empty into Lake Michigan at the bustling port town of Singapore.
If you’ve never heard of the bustling port town of Singapore, there’s a good reason: It’s not there anymore. Located just south of Holland, Singapore was indeed a bustling port town, but a fire in 1871 destroyed most of the city and then the sand dunes covered everything up. It’s a ghost town now.
Whatever the case, the Clinton-Kalamazoo Canal never made it anywhere near Singapore, because it was beset by troubles on the other side of the state right from the start.
The biggest problem, of course, was money. A major depression hit the U.S. in 1837 and took a few years to make its way to Michigan, but by the time it did, it caused all funding for the canal to dry up. The workers kept digging until 1843, but when they stopped getting paid, they stole all their equipment and went home.
Even if the money had kept flowing, though, the canal wouldn’t have worked anyway because of major design flaws. The engineers told them to make it just 20 feet wide and 4 feet deep, and it didn’t take long to realize that it was going to be way too narrow and shallow for any heavy boats to use the canal.
There was a comical scene in 1844 when a man from Rochester named Amos Brown constructed a flatboat made of logs so that he and his friends could sail down the part of the canal that had been built. He loaded everybody onto the party boat and they took off, but when they got to the first lock, the boat got stuck because it was too wide. They just left it there to rot.
Indeed, when you walk along the canal today, it looks barely wide enough for two kayaks, much less a big barge from Chicago.
Not surprisingly, the canal came to be known as “Mason’s Folly,” and it left a stain on the governor’s legacy. He did have some wins (he achieved statehood for us, after all, and was a champion of higher education), but the canal was a spectacular failure.
Mason elected not to run for reelection in 1839. Instead, he left the state and moved to New York City, where his wealthy father-in-law had a law practice. Sadly, Mason caught a bad case of pneumonia in 1843, and it killed him. He was only 31 years old.
Disastrous as it was, though, it’s a wonderful thing that “Mason’s Folly” is still around for us to explore and enjoy. There aren’t many other remnants of Michigan’s earliest days that are still intact, so we should appreciate that.
And while you can fault the Boy Governor for coming up with a bad plan, you have to give him props for thinking big. Even when we fail in Michigan, we fail big.
Buddy Moorehouse teaches documentary filmmaking at Hillsdale College.
