‘Mud’ rules Michigan lakes

Here from my files is the uncut version of my Detroit Free Press lake names article that ran in shorter form on March 22, 2002:

By Joel Thurtell

Beverly Zeldes looked out at the 6.2-acre lake behind her West Bloomfield, Michigan house. She thinks developers changed the name to make it more attractive to home buyers.

“They call it Fox Lake,” said Zeldes, “But it’s still Mud Lake on the maps.”

One thing’s clear about the folks who named Michigan’s lakes.

They had mud in their eyes.

Statewide, the names of 264 lakes are Mud.

As for clarity, only 20 lakes are called Clear.

Oakland County alone has 15 Mud Lakes.

The names are in a 3-inch thick stack of 12-by-18-inch pages listing every known lake – 35,068 of them – in each of the state’s 83 counties.

The tome by Clifford Humphrys and Janet Colby is called “Michigan Lakes and Ponds.” Published by Michigan State University in 1965, it’s still the most comprehensive inventory of lakes in Michigan, said Jennifer Runyon of the Geographic Names Office at the United States Coast and Geodetic Survey in Washington, D.C.

Where the USGS website (geonames.usgs.gov) lists 346 lakes in Oakland County, the Humphrys-Colby book catalogs 1,857, ranking Oakland second in the state for number of lakes and ninth in lake surface area with 25,504 acres..

“Which are the lakes and which are the ponds?” Humphrys said in a phone interview Thursday from his Laingsburg home.

It’s in the name, the retired MSU professor says.

“I go to the map, and if it says there’s a 2,000-acre pond, that’s how we report it. There are lakes that are less than half an acre. I can’t tinker with the name.”

With 62 entries, Twin Lakes appears to rank fifth behind Bass (69).

Except, notes Humphrys, that “Twin Lakes is plural. These Twin Lakes actually include two bodies of water.”

Doubling the number for Twin Lakes ranks it second, easily beating third-place Long (77) Lake and fourth-place Bass Lake (69).

Often, the most popular names are common images people think of when they look at  a lake, says Runyon. Think of a lake and you might think Fish (18) Lake. Maybe you have a special craving for Pike (20) or Pickerel (29).

Many lakes look like circles. Some people, striving for originality, rejected Round (58) and came up with Dollar Lake (28).

Does it look like a Horseshoe(32)? Or is it Crooked (30)?

Maybe a lake had Grass (46) on its banks or watered a grove of Cranberry (44) trees.

If a lake proved hard to find, it might be dubbed Lost (34).

In Oakland, there are two Cass and two Pontiac lakes. There are the better-known lakes with their popular state public boat ramps and parks, and there are tiny, obscure lakes called Cass and Pontiac.

Four counties – Berrien, Cass, Calhoun and Gladwin – had lakes named Nigger. A recent Michigan Department of Natural Resources county map book doesn’t show any of them. However, a Michigan United Conservation Clubs county map book from the 1980s shows a Nigger Lake in southern Berrien County.

Humphrys said he included those references because they were the lake names that existed when he compiled the book. “It’s offensive, but I had to take what was standing in the record,” Humphrys said.

Originality deserves some credit. Some, like Jim’s Lake, are named after people. But for every Houseman or Popendick Lake there are 10 Davis Lakes. And for each Dishpan, Delirium, Gold Mine, Gun Powder, Poor, Never Hunt, Old Man or Rug, there are 20 called Bullhead, 25 Cedar, 27 Duck, 27 Indian, 27 Loon and 23 Pine.

Humphrys said state troopers liked his inventory because when they got an emergency call to a Duck or Mud lake, they could look the lake up on his alphabetical list, find its unique number code, then look up that lake’s precise location.

A multitude of identical names causes less confusion now that police dispatchers can trace the address of telephone calls, but Caller ID still doesn’t work on cell phones. That’s when duplication can causes problems, said Capt. Mike McCabe of the Oakland County Sheriff’s Department.

“It wasn’t confusing for the early settlers, but their horizon was very small,” said Runyon. “They had their 160 acres and they farmed it and didn’t know that Farmer Smith a mile down the road had also named his lake Crystal (13).”

Beverly Zeldes was right about the unofficial renaming of Mud Lake.

Opposite Zeldes’ house is the 130-unit Cloister-on-the-Lake condominium development where Richard Coffey is the resident real estate broker.

“When people sell their property, they refer to it as Fox Lake and definitely not Mud Lake,” said Coffey. “It’s a lot more appealing.”

For more on names of lakes and other natural features, see the USGS Web

site at  http://geonames.usgs.gov

TOP 10 MICHIGAN LAKE NAMES

1.  MUD    264

2.  TWIN    124*

3.  LONG    77

4.  BASS    69

5.  ROUND     58

6.  GRASS      46

7.  CRANBERRY  44

8.  LOST      34

9.  HORSESHOE  32

10. BEAR, CROOKED  30

TOP OAKLAND COUNTY LAKE NAMES

1. Mud          15

2. Twin          8

3. Long          7

4. Spring          6

5. Grass, Round        5

6. Green          4

7. Dark, Dollar, Green’s, Loon, Mill, Pine  3

8. Cass, Clam, Crystal, Davis, Fish, Marl,

Pontiac, Square        2

* There are 62 references to Twin Lakes, each of which represents two bodies
of water, or 124 lakes.

Source: ”Michigan Lakes and Ponds,” by Clifford Humphrys and Janet Colby,
Michigan State University, 1965; study documented lakes and ponds as small as
1/10 acre.

Chart reprinted with permission of Detroit Free Press.