You're standing over the Boardman River, right where it runs through the middle of downtown. Some folks up here also call it by its older Anishinaabek name, the Ottaway. This is the river Perry Hannah built his first sawmill on — the reason the whole town is here — and for about a hundred and fifty years, this river was in jail.
Because that's what a dam does. Starting back in the eighteen sixties, the mills threw dams across the Boardman to run the saws, and they never really came out. There were dams up and down this river holding a lake several feet above where it naturally wanted to be, chopping the whole system into disconnected pieces. Fish that had swum this water for thousands of years — up from the big lake to spawn and back — suddenly hit a concrete wall and just stopped. For a hundred and twenty-six years.
And then this town did something huge that almost nobody outside Michigan has heard of. They took the dams out. All of them. Over about fifteen years, in one of the bigg
est river restorations ever attempted in the United States, they pulled dam after dam, stitched a couple hundred miles of river and streams back together, and let the Boardman run free for the first time since the Civil War. It cost around twenty-five million dollars, cobbled together from dozens of sources. It's the kind of thing that takes one generation to undo what the previous four generation
