Kensington Metropark: The Dam That Made a Lake

In the late nineteen thirties, a pair of reformers named Henry Curtis and Harlow Whittemore looked at southeast Michigan and saw a problem: millions of people with almost no public parkland. They pushed through legislation in nineteen thirty-nine creating the Huron-Clinton Metroparks authority, financed by a tiny property tax spread across five counties. Kensington was approved by voters in nineteen forty and opened in nineteen forty-seven.

The key move was a dam on the Huron River that transformed a seventy-acre lake into one of twelve hundred acres. That body of water, Kent Lake, is now the center of the most visited year-round park in Michigan, drawing roughly two and a half million visitors every year. What the reformers built with a few cents per thousand dollars of property value turned out to be one of the best public investments in Michigan history.