The Boardman River Set Free
Near Traverse City, Michigan
The river slipping quietly through downtown Traverse City is the Boardman, the same stream that turned Perry Hannah's sawmill and floated his pine to the bay. For most of the twentieth century it was chopped into a chain of stagnant ponds by four dams built to make electricity and hold back water. Starting in twenty eleven, Traverse City did something bold.
It began tearing those dams down, in what became the largest dam-removal and river-restoration project in Michigan history. The Brown Bridge Dam came out first. It had held back the biggest pond, roughly one hundred ninety-one acres of water, since nineteen twenty-one, and when it was breached the drained bottomland revealed about two and a half miles of buried river that had not seen daylight in nearly a century.
The Boardman and Sabin dams followed, removed by twenty eighteen. All told, the project reconnected around one hundred sixty miles of river and streams that had been fragmented for more than a hundred and twenty years, letting fish, current, and cold clean water run free again through the heart of cherry country.
