Yoopers fight to keep drinking mystery water from a ghost town well
GREENLAND TOWNSHIP — There’s mystery water flowing from a hose that sticks out of a hole in the ground in an Upper Peninsula ghost town. And people in the area have been drinking it for years.
“It is probably the purest water you’d ever taste,” said Ron Store, a 56year-old Ontonagon County commissioner. “You can put this stuff in a glass jar, sit it on your porch for a month and it’s not going to turn green. That’s how good this stuff is.”
This water is found in Lake Mine, a ghost town that sits inside the boundaries of Greenland Township, just east of the Lake Superior coast in the western Upper Peninsula. The well it comes from is little more than a cluster of old concrete pilings poking out of the ground in remembrance of something that once stood there, and in the middle is a hole that’s framed by a few blocks of wood and topped by a metal grate. Underneath is an old pipe with a few valves and spigots, and from there the hose emerges.
It’s just off a trail in the woods, where it’s shrouded by vegetation in the summer, hidden by snow during winter, hard to spot regardless.
For a century, the only people aware of it were those who lived nearby and drank it, and who passed down knowledge of this secret well in the woods. “Everybody around here knew, and everybody would use it quietly,” Store said.
That changed when the state found out.
A couple of years ago, the Michigan Department of Environment, Great Lakes and Energy learned about it and said there’s just no way people can drink unregulated water from an unknown source that comes out of some hose in the ground. They ordered it to be shut down.
The people who use it were up in arms — almost literally. They’ve been drinking the water for generations, they told EGLE. Nobody’s ever gotten sick off it, they said. And they didn’t
want the state telling them what they can and can’t drink.
“At the time I told them, ‘You know, you go ahead and shut this thing down and you’re going to be greeted by guns,’ ” Store said. “And that’s the truth. I had people saying, ‘You tell me when they’re coming, and we’ll be there to defend it.’ ”
A secret no more
The Bill Nicholls Trail is used for everything from hiking and horseback riding in the summer to snowmobiling and cross-country skiing in the winter. It was carved out by the Department of Natural Resources atop an old railroad grade on some land that it acquired in 1974. It spans 41 miles through dense wilderness, thick forests and a handful of copper mining ghost towns. One of those towns is Lake Mine.
One day a few years ago, a DNR crew was grading the trail and their blade nicked a shallow pipe, which burst forth with water. Workers followed the line until it led them to the hidden trailside well. To their astonishment they learned that it was not only being used by hundreds of people in the area as their drinking water, but also that it was actually being piped into some nearby homes.
“It was a surprise to everyone because this was not on any infrastructure maps,” said Stacy Welling Haughey, a U.P. field deputy for the DNR. “This line should not have been there. It wasn’t listed on any documents. That’s how old it was.”
Lake Mine was first settled in 1840, originally named Belt for the copper mining company that operated a oneshaft mine there. The Lake Copper Company bought the land in 1905, built 80 homes for its employees and renamed the town Lake Mine. To provide water for them, the company drilled until it found some kind of underground reservoir, and then installed pipes that delivered the water into all the homes. The company also built a well and a water tower alongside the railroad tracks where steam engine locomotives could stop and fill up.
The mine soon closed, the trains stopped coming, the houses fell apart and the tower eventually collapsed to the ground into a heap of debris. But the people of the region never stopped using the water from the well beneath it. To this day, there are often several people lined up near the well, waiting to fill jugs, bottles, even tanks that can hold hundreds of gallons so they can take the water home.
“I like how cold it is, how fresh it tastes,” said Nicole DeHaan, 40, of Mass City. “I know a lot of farmers around me use it because their wells can’t keep up to water their cattle. I know some elderly people, that is their only drinking source. And a lot of hunters come up, they don’t have water at their camp, so that’s what they use. I know some people in Ontonagon who use it because their water tests positive for uranium, and even though they have filtration systems they can’t filter it out, so they come here to get water to drink and cook with.”
Wells draw water from underground aquifers, which are pockets of water within the deep bedrock, the solid layer that lies deep beneath the soil. A freeflowing well brings water to the surface due to underground pressure, and needs no pump. Wells like these are relied upon in rural communities where residents are spread too thinly for a
municipal water system to be practical, and they’re often less susceptible to pollution than surface water. Most wells lie 100-500 feet below ground, though some are much deeper, depending on an area’s geology.
Well water is fairly common in Michigan. More than a million households in the state get their drinking water this way, and about 15,000 new wells are drilled every year, according to EGLE. And although a hidden well in the woods might seem unusual, unregistered old wells aren’t entirely rare in Michigan. “You’ll find those scattered all through the state where there’s naturally occurring springs, and people have been using them for years, mainly for seasonal homes or watering livestock, those kinds of things,” said Kate Beer with the Western U.P. Health Department.
“There’s a lot of salt water that gets into the wells around here, and this is some of the best water that we’ve ever tasted,” said Kayln Hudson-Store, 44, of Ontonagon. “Everyone uses it over their own wells; they just don’t advertise it.”
But nobody knew the actual source of the Lake Mine water. The pipe led from the well to a nearby hillside, but, from there, it plunged deep into the ground. Old mining records are spotty and unhelpful. Local lore said it was an artesian aquifer, and the constant water pressure it provides suggests that’s the case. “This is probably 100% pre-glacier water,” Store said. “You’re down to the purest source. There’s no chemicals in it. Nothing can penetrate to it.”
Even if that was originally true, EGLE said, the whole area has been mined heavily over the years, and all that drilling might have breached or cracked the bedrock, leading to contamination of the water. Plus, the 3-inch, century-old steel pipe bringing the water to the surface is now brittle and prone to infiltration. Since the well lies on state property, the DNR was ordered to cap it.
“The DNR needs to cease and desist serving water to the public by use of the trailside flowing water outlet,” within 30 days, EGLE said flatly in its order in late 2022. “To date, all efforts to identify and locate the source, presumed to be on state forest land (administered by the DNR), have been unsuccessful and, despite explicit signage directing people not to drink the water, the public continues to use water for consumption and other household purposes.”
That public was outraged.
“We all thought it was bullshit,” said
Candi Finley, 46, of Mass City. “We’ve all used it forever. There’s no reason to shut it down. It’s way better than well water.”
Her dad echoed her feelings. He has been drinking from the well since 1980, when he bought his Mass City home as a hunting camp. “A lot of people, the older ones, they’ve lived on it their whole life,” said Wes Finley, 67. “I think it’s bull that they’re messing with it. It’s unreal why they’re doing this. Just leave it alone.”
Joe Porter also owns a hunting camp near the well, which his family uses for water. “In my eyes it’s a natural water source,” said the 37-year-old from Ludington. “When I talked to EGLE this last summer I said if I wanted to go to the lake and get water, I could do that. You gonna stop me from doing that too? How are you going to limit me where I can get my water?”
An unexpected twist
Like most people in the area, Store spent years quietly bringing home the water for himself, his family and his farm animals without much thought. Suddenly, he was spearheading an effort to save it for everyone.
“I’m just a lonely little county commissioner, just been sworn in a month ago, and now I’m leading the charge on this thing,” he said. “Everybody’s calling me, saying the DNR is going to shut this well down, what can we do about it?”
Residents pestered state regulators on their home phones. County officials held meetings with the departments involved. State legislators from the area lobbied on behalf of their constituents. Local historians came forward and offered clues to the source of the water, based on old maps and newspaper articles, hoping the source could be proven pure. The Western U.P. Health Department conducted regular tests on the water coming out of the hose, all of which came back safe.
In the meantime, while this was being sorted out, EGLE ordered that a sign be put up by the well, right next to the concrete pilings left over from the longgone railroad water tower, warning people not to drink from the hose. But people just kept stealing the signs.
That was their mildest form of protest, though.
“Local people threatened to physically inhibit the DNR from closing it off,” said Mike Kocher, 65, Ontonagon County’s emergency services director. “It could’ve got ugly. We were able to convince local folks to let us see what we can do.”
Store warned state officials of the same danger. “You do something really radical like just coming in and shutting it off, you’re going to be met with a lot of resistance, and somebody’s going to get hurt,” Store said. “We can solve this if you’re willing to sit down and talk.”
Then something happened that surprised everyone. The DNR offered to help people keep the water.
“I think it was the human part of it, like, ‘if this was my community, if this was my well, what would I want someone else to do?’ ” said the DNR’s Welling Haughey. “I’d want them to try every way they could to help fix it. I don’t think anybody really realized how important it was and how much it was being used and how impactful it was. So we wanted to do what we could to fix it and make it right with the community.”
The DNR unearthed the pipe, traced it to the well head, even offered to run a camera down the water main to see whether it could be kept in use. But EGLE said no to all of that. The pipe, this well, these hoses — none of them are even remotely up to code, the department said. The well, they said, simply can’t be saved.
Locals were frustrated by this. “Here we have this absolutely pure source of water that’s been running for 100 years,” Kocher said. “But because of the way rules and regs are written, we can’t use it in its current form.”
So the DNR has now offered to drill not one, but two new wells that will be up to current standards. One will be for the people who draw water from the well to take home, and one will be for the last house standing that still relies on the water first piped in a century ago.
“That’s unprecedented that the DNR’s actually going to pay to have two wells drilled,” Kocher said. “But they want to do the right thing and get out from underneath it.”
If new wells are dug, EGLE said, the water can keep flowing. The deadline is September, but it’s a movable target. “If another extension is needed I believe it most likely will be granted as long as progress toward final resolution is being maintained,” said Scott Dean of EGLE.
Now that the hard ground has thawed, the DNR is working with a driller to find a good place to drill. A local logging company donated some land for the new wells.
The township offered to take ownership of them and conduct regular testing to ensure safety.
The only thing left is to finally figure out where the water in that hose comes from. The only way to do that is to drill and see what they hit.
In the meantime, word of the secret well has spread. “I’ve seen motorcycles pull in from Montana and Wyoming, and they stop and try it and they’re like, ‘Wow, that’s some of the best water we’ve ever had,’ ” Store said. “How the hell do they know about it?”
Store recently had a brief stay in the hospital, and even there he had Lake Mine well water brought to him. It’s way better than the hospital water, he insisted.
“My wife was bringing me a gallon every other day,” he said. “I’m sorry, but when you’re used to good, clean, fresh water, that’s what you want. And that’s what this is all about — keeping that cool, clean fresh water flowing. I hope it’s there for years to come. I hope this wasn’t all in vain.”