By Carrie La Seur
FLOW Legal Director —
When I ask them how they feel about the Pine, their local waters – , people who’ve lived in Gratiot County, Michigan all their lives – remember childhood summers spent swimming in the mill pond behind the dam at Alma. That’s not possible anymore. Fall rains and falling temperatures might clear out the film of thick, green algae, but in the hot summer months, an enterprising bug could crawl from one river bank to the other across a green carpet. But in deeper layers of the “excessively well drained” sandy soil lie older stories, reaching back to pre-human times.
During the last ice age, roughly 115,000 to 11,700 years ago, massive ice shields advanced and retreated across the land mass we now know as Michigan – a name derived from the Algonquin phrase for great water. They left behind a landscape that slopes ever so gently, with the occasional small hill or ridge, from the Pine River’s headwaters at Remus to Saginaw Bay. The lack of incline allows pollutants to pile up on the ground, then leach into the sandy soils or run across the land to streams and lakes.
“Dam on the Pine River, Alma, Mich.” by Detroit Publishing Co., publisher. Circa 1895 to 1910.
Michigan’s original inhabitants, the ancestors of present day Ojibwe, Odawa, Bodewadmi and other indigenous nations, lived mostly along the big waters. It was simple to step into a canoe and travel. French traders, who often married into the tribes, learned similar habits. The flat, rather swampy interior of the land mass got little settlement until people of English origin arrived on the banks of a river they called the Pine. It was a cold trout stream that provided good drinking water. Sauk, Ojibwe, and Fox residents of the area seem to have thought of it as part of the Tittabawassee basin, where they’d lived for thousands of years. Tittabawassee came from the Anishinaabemowin phrase thraw-tippe-a-wasco-ach, meaning “place of the light” in English, for clearings and marshes in the area that relieved the darkness of Michigan’s dense virgin forests.
The English would quickly discover that for farming, the soil was poor and the weather uncooperative. In its early days, the county earned the nickname “Starving Gratiot” due to crop failures.
By the mid-1800s, though, settlers found a way to make money to buy whatever they required. White pine logging boomed. In 1853, Lyman M. Wixom built the first sawmill in Alma. By 1880, five bustling sawmills were voraciously consuming the surrounding forests, bringing prosperity at a steep cost. Abundant forests gave way to a scarred landscape, vulnerable to erosion and wildfires – the first blow of many to the Pine.
Next, a salty aquifer near the surface led to a brine extraction industry. In 1935, Michigan Chemical Corporation (later known as Velsicol Chemical) broke ground in St. Louis, downstream of Alma, forever altering the Pine’s history. Velsicol’s economic boost would leave a legacy of environmental devastation that casts a long shadow to this day. Operations at the St. Louis plant were a toxic nightmare. The company produced chemicals, including DDT, a potent insecticide that was later banned, and PBBs, a flame retardant, linked to cancer and birth defects. 3 Workers routinely dumped these and other hazardous chemicals into the Pine and its tributaries.
The river became a wasteland. Toxins decimated fish and wildlife populations, and compromised local residents’ health. During the 1970s, the PBB contamination crisis tarnished Michigan’s reputation as a source of fresh water and healthy food. A tragic mistake at the Velsicol plant led to accidental mixing of PBBs into livestock feed, resulting in one of the worst environmental disasters in U.S. history. Contamination spread throughout the state’s food supply, affecting millions of people.
Shooting cows suffering from exposure to PBB in the 1970s, as shown in the documentary The Poisoning of Michigan (BBC, 1980)
Although the Saginaw Chippewa Indian Tribe had retained fishing rights on the river under the 1819 Treaty of the Saginaw, those rights became meaningless by 1974 due to a complete ban on fish consumption from the Pine imposed by state health officials.
The legacy of Velsicol’s pollution haunts the Pine River and surrounding communities. Decades after the plant closed, the river struggles to recover from contaminated sediments. Young adults who grew up on the banks of the Pine and Tittabawassee don’t remember a time when they were allowed to swim in the water that flowed past their homes. For some, the experience shaped them into environmentalists.
“The first time I swam in a river,” one law student told me, “it was a life-altering experience.” Pollution has many negative effects on children. The one positive effect I know of is that it often makes them determined to protect natural resources that weren’t protected for them.
