Watkins Lake State Park home to a rediscovered piece of the Great Depression
Bronze U.S. Coast and Geodetic Survey marker in Watkins Lake State Park and County Preserve, placed as part of C.W.A. New Deal Program to employ out-of-work engineers in surveying the United States. Photo courtesy of Janice Kessler.
by Sara Swanson
You probably know that Manchester Township along with neighboring Norvell Township is home to Watkins Lake State Park and County Preserve, Michigan’s 103rd state park as well as the first state park in Michigan to be jointly managed with a county recreation agency. What you might not know is that the park is home to an almost century-old survey marker that was lost for 75 years and found by Manchester’s own Janice Kessler.
While there are all sorts of survey markers, this survey marker came about because of the Great Depression.
During the Great Depression, the Civil Works Administration, a New Deal Program, provided immediate, temporary relief by directly employing millions of unemployed people for manual labor during the winter of 1933–34. One unemployed group was engineers. In the fall of 1933, the U.S. Coast and Geodetic Survey Bureau was asked to head up a limited-term project to employ out-of-work engineers in surveying the country.
In Michigan, Professor C.M. Cade, Department of Civil Engineering at Michigan State College in Lansing, oversaw the project in addition to his regular job. He was assisted by Professor J. H. Service, from Michigan College of Mines in Houghton, who acted as supervisor for the surveys in the Upper Peninsula. Both were former Coast and Geodetic Survey Officers. Work started on November 27, 1933, and continued through to June 30, 1935. On average, 100 men a week were employed with the maximum number being 339 men. The men were assigned areas to survey near their homes to minimize the need for travel, and in exchange for using their personal vehicles, they were reimbursed for maintenance and accidents.
Using non-specialized surveying equipment, precise vertical and horizontal measurements were determined and noted as well as the elevation, and a bronze disk was put in place at each site. Anyone could contact the U.S. Coast and Geodetic Survey Bureau for information on the locations afterward, and for years the markers were used to help in map making and establishing property and municipality boundaries.
Twenty-seven separate areas were surveyed in different parts of the state. In Washtenaw County, Ann Arbor to Ypsi was surveyed. In Jackson County, Leslie to Francis; Waterloo through Leoni, to Henrietta; the vicinity of the City of Jackson; and the vicinity of Grass Lake were surveyed. No surveying in Lenawee was done. Each separate area had its own number letter designations. The Watkins Lake marker is number 12 – B1, which indicates it was part of the Grass Lake area survey.
In 1941, the marker at Watkins Lake was last located and described as “3 1/4 MILES SOUTHEAST OF NORVELL, 5 1/4 MILES WEST-SOUTHWEST OF MANCHESTER, and 5 3/4 MILES EAST NORTHEAST OF BROOKLYN, IN THE N E 1/4, SEC. 13, T 4 S, R 2 E, 36 YARDS NORTHWEST OF THE NEW YORK CENTRAL RAILROAD STATION AT WATKINS, 24.0 FEET NORTH OF THE NORTH RAIL, 22.7 FEET SOUTH OF THE NORTH RIGHT-OF-WAY FENCE LINE, 7.2 FEET NORTHWEST OF A CONCRETE WHISTLE POST AND ABOUT 3 FEET ABOVE TOP OF RAIL.”
This is what Kessler had to work with when she went hunting for the marker in 2016. Of course, the railroad station and line were long gone.
She explained that she looks for survey markers as a hobby called “benchmark hunting,” which evolved out of geocaching in the early part of the millennium. Kessler has been benchmark hunting since around 2007. She stated, “At the same time geocaching first started learning about survey markers, satellites and handheld GPS made the survey markers mostly obsolete and almost all funding for finding and maintaining survey markers was completely cut. The National Geodetic Survey (which is just one of many, many agencies) opened their database to the public and heavily relies on the public to photograph and report on survey markers they come across.”
Click here for how to start survey-marker hunting: SurveyMarkHunting.
Many markers have a sign or post set nearby called a “witness post” that also gives an address where people can write to get more info. Kessler had seen a witness post on the Waterloo-Pinckney Trail (the actual survey marker is missing, only the witness post is there) and she had, in her words, “spent a ridiculous amount of time trying to figure out what a survey marker was.” That led her to the Geocaching.com website where they had at the time a webpage for learning about benchmark hunting. She used Geocaching.com to hunt up a few markers on M-52 and thought the whole thing was incredibly dull. Sometime later, she was driving south on Sylvan Road, crossed over Grass Lake Road, and her husband pointed out an old witness post. She pulled over and had to fight her way through the brush to take some photos. She then had to figure out which agency owned the marker. Once there was a challenge involved, she was hooked.
Using the National Geodetic Survey database, Kessler researched and found several markers in the area, so she’d known about the Watkins Lake marker for years. She stated, “Within minutes of learning the Trolz Farm property had become a state park, my husband and I drove down Arnold Road and as we rounded the corner by [where] the parking lot [is now] I said there’s a survey marker up there somewhere that hasn’t been documented since 1941 and I really want to find it.” A few days after that they stopped and talked to Jim O’Brien, the park manager at that time, and asked permission to hop the fence and metal detect. He said yes.
Kessler continued, “About a week later we went back and at that point the gate was opened and a rough parking lot had been created. We went up to the flagpole, because I knew that the train depot had been near that, told my husband to go over to the fence line and pace off 22 feet from the fence. He literally waved the metal detector and found it. He found it so fast it was almost a disappointment … my expectation had been that I’d be there for two weeks and never find it.” The database had it about 800 feet from where they found it. She explained that the way the earth is measured has changed several times, but the actual description of how to find it was accurate.
She took some photos and some measurements and emailed a photo of the marker to Jim O’Brien and somebody who was with the NGS but working in Lansing. She stated, “That guy did a ‘mark recovery report.’ I also did a mark recovery report, but mine is dated the day after his. This is annoying to me because it makes it look like he was first to find it. I’d emailed him with the photo to upload because it was very difficult for me to upload photos to their database back then. But dang it, I made sure I got my photo up there after that ’cause I wasn’t going to let anyone else get ahead of me on that again. When you get to the photos for that in the NGS database, the first two are mine. To this day, the first photo has been on my cell phone lock screen.”
Kessler states, “The markers are considered to be federal monuments under federal protection. … Out of the 800+ that were set [in Michigan], only a few still exist. If the Public Works project went through, they often got destroyed during construction. Many were set near roads, but no one realized how roads would widen, with bigger shoulders and ditches and utility easements. Farmers often dug out around them and broke them, because hitting one with their farm equipment could mean costly repairs. Consequently, the few that remain are considered rare and rather special.”
Next time you visit Watkins Lake State Park and County Preserve, see if you can find the marker. Kessler explained, “It sits 120 feet northwest of the flagpole, on the north side the rail trail, three feet south of an orange Carsonite post.”
If you end up catching the survey marker hunting bug, there is one in the City of Manchester. In Kirk Park, in a narrow strip of grass between the parking lot and street, there’s a marker that was set in 2008. Kessler states, “Technically, it’s a reference mark for a survey marker, but it’s still a marker!”
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