Onekama & Portage Lake — a stop on M-22.
Coming up is the village of Onekama, sitting on Portage Lake — and this quiet little place has one of the best stories on the whole coast, which is that the townspeople once took a shovel to the landscape and permanently rearranged the geography.
Portage Lake used to be separated from Lake Michigan by a sand bar. A dam and a mill operation held the water level artificially high, which flooded farmland around the lake and made the settlers here increasingly furious. Legal appeals went nowhere.
So in eighteen seventy-one, the residents gathered at the bar with shovels and started digging a channel to the big lake themselves. And once the water found the cut, it did the rest — the whole thing blew out in a matter of hours. Portage Lake dropped, permanently, and it has been connected to Lake Michigan ever since. They dug a channel in a day and it's still there a century and a half later.
The village name comes from the Ojibwe, and this stretch is now a harbor town of marinas and summer cottages. The channel they dug is the reason boats can get in and out at all.