Finding Thread Lake in the Heart of Flint
“What’s the need of visiting far-off mountains and bogs, if a half-hour’s walk will carry me into such wildness and novelty?” --Henry David Thoreau
There is a lake practically at the center of Flint—Thread Lake—just a stone’s throw south-east of downtown. It began its life in a time before Flint became “Vehicle City,” when an enterprising miller, Rufus Stevens, dammed Thread Cree in 1830 to power a mill. Stevens was the first white settler in Grand Blanc, and when he established his mill, there was wilderness all around Thread Lake. As the carriage industry gained a toehold, an amusement park was built on the west end of the lake, and a trolley line brought thousands to enjoy the rides, the shows, the dancing, the boating at Lakeside Park from 1905 through the Depression. Today, there is no evidence that such a park existed—just a big paved parking lot and the tin shed that was once McKinley senior center (now closed and the building scorched by arsonists). Why did Flint give up on Lakeside Park? Why has it forgotten its hidden gem? The short answer is: the automobile. Once Flint residents had cars and the wealth to buy recreational toys and summer cottages, they couldn’t wait to go “up north.” But this brings me back to Thoreau’s question: “what’s the need of visiting far-off mountains and bogs”? Thoreau, for those of you who don’t know, was a resident of Concord, Massachusetts in the 1830s and 40s, who built himself a little house on the local Walden Pond—a mile from any neighbor. In his writings, he adjures us not to go looking further and further afield for recreation and refreshment but to seek the wild source in our own backyards and, more importantly, in our own selves: “It is vain to dream of wildness distant from ourselves. There is none such. It is the bog in our brain and bowels, the primitive vigor of Nature in us, that inspires that dream.”[1] The collective abandonment of Thread Lake—most Flint residents don’t know where it is!—is a symptom of larger cultural problem. As I write this, the lake is literally vanishing due to a dam breach. Its carp-filled waters rush through open gates, while bald eagles search the mud flats for remaining fish. If we viewed this as a different kind of water crisis, perhaps we could muster the collective will to save this patch of wilderness in our backyard. To help you understand why Thread Lake might matter, let me tell you a story.
I moved to Flint from Boston in 1996 for a teaching job, and I became fast friends with my department secretary, Fran Frazier. It was Fran who introduced me to Thread Lake through reminiscences of summer days when she’d take the street car to Lakeside Park with her father. She remembered eating cotton candy, riding the roller coaster, and renting rowboats. Fran lived on Stockton Street in what once had been a boarding house her parents ran for factory workers. Her dad worked at Chevy-in-the-Hole and had used his first paycheck to buy a fiddle. When she died, Fran gave my husband that same violin. She said it would be a gift for me, too—music in the house—if I wasn’t like her mother, a killjoy, who was annoyed by sound.
In the years when I was friends with Fran, I was also getting to know Paul, my future husband. Paul is archivist of The Genesee Historical Collections Center, housed in the UM-F library. I told him all I’d heard about Thread Lake. I remember one particular conversation over breakfast, the summer we married, when I marveled at how much water there was in Flint: there’s the Flint River, Kearsley Creek, Gilkey Creek, nearby lakes, and, of course, Thread Lake. “I wish we had a boat … wouldn’t that be cool … to paddle around Flint?” When I dredged up this dream, my version of Huck Finn’s raft on the Mississippi, I never expected Paul to embrace it, but he did. Later that same day, we were at Rocky’s on South Saginaw, buying a green aluminum Radisson canoe—light enough to throw on the car—and that evening, we were paddling it on Thread Lake! For the next 3-4 years, from courtship through marriage up until the adoption of a baby daughter, we headed to Thread Lake many times each week of spring, summer, and fall. We explored every bay, every mucky swamp. Usually, we’d put the canoe in at a dock at the end of Winans Street (off Lippincott) in an historically black neighborhood, where we’d seen the carcasses of dogs deposited (dog fighting is still ghetto sport). Sometimes we’d often see the same guy fishing off the dock, who told us tales about snappers that lived back in “the hole,” and when we asked where exactly was “the hole,” he gestured up toward the creek. We’d head in the direction, paddling upstream, scaring ducks, observing herons, and once even startled a coyote who was doing his own hunting. Pressing further into wilderness, Paul determined one summer that we should clear the creek of branches that blocked our passage to the interior and, sure enough, waist-deep in water, using a small chainsaw, he cut through and cleared the blockage. Later his own circulatory system clogged, resulting in a heart attack, and the flow of energy in our marriage ceased. But those Thread Lake summers, we experienced the mythic truth that rivers, streams, and ponds bring the principle of circulation to settled societies. I remember one July 4th, when we packed a small cooler with beer and Chinese take-out, and paddled out to the big island (just oak and goose poop) to wait for the fireworks. They came, but so did a screech of brakes, a crunch of metal, and the sound of smashing glass—accident on I-475 that runs along the lake. How much better off we were alone on an island in what seemed an isolated lake, faraway from chaos and ruin.
I have no doubt that this search for wildness close to home was an essential activity for a newly married couple. Nobody else knew or cared about Thread Lake, but we did. It was our secret world, our private place to explore. Paul and I tried out other lakes further away: they looked cleaner but were always filled with loud motor boats, jet skis, and drunken men. We always went back to Thread Lake, and it worked like a charm for all that ailed us. Just like Thoreau who felt his “spirits infallibly rise in proportion to the outward dreariness,” we felt energized when floating on muddy waters. You could never see the bottom, you could only wonder what monsters lay below. Unfathomable and mysterious, this lake would never be a tourist destination, would never be on anybody’s “bucket list.” It somehow reminded us that marriage did not have to be a normalizing or a civilizing process … that it could be a mutual encouragement to grow wild.
Once we adopted a daughter from distant Kazakhstan, things changed. As she grew, we tried to share our love of Thread Lake with her. Paul took her ice-fishing there one winter, but she got too close to the hole and fell in. We took her in the canoe, but she never took to it, and, as she became and tween and a teen, she was more drawn to society than either of her parents, much too interested, for our taste, in staying connected to people in the ephemeral worlds of Facebook and Instagram. As a result, our canoe sits unused in backyard, overgrown with weeds, and serving as a hooch for two corgis. The longer we stayed away from Thread Lake, the sicker our marriage got. Every summer for the last five, I’ve thought about buying my own house and moving out. This spring, I noticed from I-475, on my way to grocery shop at the Hill Road Meijer, that Thread Lake seems to be drying up. Sad but fitting. No lake. No marriage. I told Paul what I’d seen, and a couple of weeks ago, we headed over to check it out on a Saturday evening after dinner dishes were done. He had a hard time admitting that the lake was disappearing. “Paul, it is different. It was never like this. It is dying,” I said desperately. We walked the mud flats at the edges and were surprised at how relatively clean the lake bottom appeared to be. “Hey, look! There are lots of clam shells. Fresh water clams. Is that a sign of health?” We walked the familiar paths through the woods, up to the ruined picnic pavilion where, in the past, we’d untangled sweet pea vines, located individual plant stems with difficulty, and dug up a few to transplant into our backyard garden. The wild plants never took. But that night, we spotted two bald eagles perched in trees above the lake on the other side, looking for fish whose big brown backs were easily visible in the shallow water. The walk was sad, but the place still worked its magic because we could still see new things; and I felt close to Paul without needing to use old words.
In the weeks following our discovery that the lake was in critical condition due to a dam breach in February, Paul and I began a different kind of rediscovery. He found detailed topographical survey maps at work that he scanned and attempted to merge into one huge map of the lake region. I spent time reading articles from old Flint Journals that helped me better understand the history of the lake that was in my brain and bowels. Once we gain access to the wildness in ourselves, Thoreau writes in a journal entry, anywhere on the globe can become “thrillingly novel and wild.” Then and then only, will humanity be able to “restore all things to their original primitive flourishing and promising state.” So … this was my mission: to discover a more promising time in the history of Thread Lake that was not just my private world but the place of recreation for at least two generations of Flint’s workers.
Research gave me a new appreciation for the resiliency of the lake. It nearly died once before. During World War II, there was talk of a possible Civil Works Administration project that would have enlisted me to clear stumps from the lake bottom. To facilitate this, the lake was drained and remained dry for a year. But the work never got done. When thirty-four cases of malaria were blamed on the lake “left in bad condition,” members of the South Flint Club, angry at the incessant delay and passing of the buck, accused the City Park Department of “discrimination.” This news item was in a Detroit Free Press article from 1935; and many journalists compared Flint’s Thread Lake to Detroit’s Belle Isle, suggesting that it was dereliction of civic duty to let the lake go.
That was just one “day in the life” of a lake that survived—re-filled and flourished, although not much longer as a “Mecca” for the “throngs” seeking to ride the roller-coaster, listen to the concerts by the “Flint Colored Band” (1905), the “Buick Band” (1916), the “Moose Band” (1935), or dance to the Quintano’s Italian band of sixteen pieces at the pavilion (1913). Its heyday was a brief 30-year span from 1905-1935. But there was other information to be culled from the public record that spoke to the wildness of the lake. Based on a study done by the Michigan Department of Conservation, it had the largest carp concentration of any Michigan lake: 700 fish per acre. Of course, no one eats carp—no one but my husband’s gypsy friends, who, when they visited from Chicago, fished the Flint River for carp to make soup. In addition to breeding an undesirable fish, Thread Lake’s spring-fed waters made especially good ice, if you can trust advertising of “Flint Spring Water Ice Company,” which sat on the shore of the lake in 1913. The company identified the source of Thread Creek twenty miles south and west of Flint in the hills near Drayton Plains in Oakland County.
“The pure sparkling water that bubbles up from the earth at beautiful Drayton Plains flows through the meadows and woodlands over a gravel bed until it reaches the wood-crested southern shores of Thread Lake.”
Pretty bucolic, huh? I confess that “pure” and “spring-fed” were never in my mind in those summer days of canoeing on the lake. Indeed, I assiduously avoided putting my hands and feet in that water. As it turns out, I was wrong to be so finicky, and Paul was right to get in up to his armpits to saw apart the fallen trees that blocked our way. True, the lake was cloudy. It looked dirty, but I don’t think it was polluted. There was always too much wildlife, too many clams, and the lake bed is clean, all things considered. When I looked at the Atlas of Genesee County from 1873 and noticed that all the parcels of land around the lake (50 acres, 25 acres, 30 acres) were identified by farmer’s name and colored with shades of pink, yellow, and light green, I could almost envision the fountainhead of the lake, bubbling up in some idyllic pasture in Oakland County, and I could almost see the shores of my lake as “wood-crested.”
Thoreau, who had his finger on the sluggish pulse of village life in every time period, knew that what is needed is “a little more manhood or virtue”—by that he means primitive vigor or wildness—to “convert the district road into an untrodden cranberry bog, for it restores all things to their original primitive flourishing and promising state.” If I began to recover Thread Lake with a day or two of research, I knew that a walk—a mini-pilgrimage—would take me to the holy land again—the essential wilderness of the place and of myself. Through the neighborhoods I sauntered—south and west from my house.[2] I crossed the railroad tracks and headed down to the lake. I walked carefully along a four by eight board across the dam, passed workmen who assured me that new steel gates are being made, and headed up the muddy path. “Here I am!” I said to myself—at the site where the carnival music and dance bands once played, and where, today, a strange sound woke me: the slap, slap, slapping of swans’ wings hitting the water as they drummed themselves aloft. The sound forced me out of my thoughts to participate in the lively event of witnessing two enormous birds lift off the lake’s surface. And in the sound of wings on water I also heard the slap of canoe paddles, and that sound made me think that my marriage may not be dead yet, might still be a promising place like Thread Lake, if I can find in myself once more that wild urge to strike out from my habitual paths.
[1] Henry David Thoreau, Journals, Aug. 30 1856, Henry David Thoreau, An American Landscape: Selected Writings from His Journals, ed. Robert L. Rothwell (New York: Paragon House, 1991), 126-27.
[2] In his essay, “Walking,” Thoreau discusses the etymology of saunter, which he says derives from “idle people who roved about the country, in the Middle Ages, and asked charity, under pretence of going a la Sainte Terr,” to the Holy Land. See Thoreau, “Walking,” Walden, Civil Disobedience, and Other Writings, ed. William Rossi (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1992), 260.
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