This blog is an adaptation of the History of the Watershed Through Time storymap.
Glacial Beginnings
The Huron River has not always existed as we know it today. The birth of the Huron was a complicated, often-changing quest as the river tried to find the lowest available parts of the landscape as it tried to reach the sea.
The beginnings of the Huron River were crafted towards the end of the last ice age. If you were to be transported to Michigan 20,000 before present (BP), you would have found no forests, no wetlands, no Great Lakes. In fact, you would have been standing on glaciers up to a mile thick. Over the next 10,000 years the climate began to warm, melting the ice sheets and uncovering the land beneath. One of the first regions to melt was the thin ice at the border of the Saginaw and Huron-Erie glacial lobes in south-central Michigan.
Vast rivers formed, carrying the meltwater away from the receding glaciers. These drainage paths carved depressions in the land and deepened those already present.
By 14,000 BP, the earliest ancestor of the Huron River emerged as a glacial stream with its headwaters in the Hamburg area of Livingston County. At this time, the waters of the Huron River ended up in the Gulf of Mexico, instead of the Atlantic Ocean where they go today. The river flowed west towards South Bend where it met up with the ancient Kankakee River, eventually making its way to the Mississippi River and turning south to the Gulf of Mexico.
As the glaciers continued to retreat, land was revealed. And the river, determined to find the lowest path, followed newly uncovered drainage paths. Around 13,000 BP, the Huron River began to flow into Lake Erie’s ancestor, Lake Maumee. At this time, the mouth of the Huron River was around present-day Ypsilanti, and everything east was submerged under Lake Maumee. However, as glaciers melted further and the geology of the Great Lakes changed, the lake level retreated.
By around 10,000 BP the Huron River found its current path and has stayed relatively stable since.
Kettle Lakes
A remnant of ice ages past that can be spotted throughout the Huron River Watershed are kettle lakes. These lakes were formed by ice blocks that broke off as glaciers receded. As the ice blocks sat on the freshly uncovered ground, soil and rock debris (outwash) from glacial meltwater filled in around them. Then, as the climate warmed and the ice blocks melted, the depressions left filled with water and became lakes. Kettle lakes tend to be small and deep, and can be spotted throughout the Huron River watershed. In fact, a majority of the inland lakes in Michigan are kettle lakes.
The Fingerprint of Lake Maumee
Another indication of the watershed’s glacial past can be seen in the variety of ecosystems. The lower Huron River watershed, from Ypsilanti to Lake Erie, is positioned in the ancient Maumee Lake Plain. As a result, the landscape is low-lying, flat, and dominated by fine glacial till and lake sediments, making the soil highly fertile but the area poorly drained. As the first humans arrived in this area 12,000 BP, they would have found flatwood swamps, beech forest, and lake plain prairie. But travel west beyond the Maumee Lake Plain and it’s a different ecoregion. The soil becomes more clay, sand, and gravel and the land drains better. The first humans would have found oak hickory forests, oak savannas, and prairies.
However, many of these ecosystems are hard to find in the present-day Huron River watershed. As humans settled the land, they greatly altered the landscape by clearing land for agriculture, damming rivers, and draining wetlands. To learn more about the watershed’s 12,000 years of human history and how it has altered the watershed’s ecology, view the Huron River Watershed Through Time storymap.