This is a ghost town and one room school cache. It is a park and grab that may or may not be winter friendly but it's out of the way of the snow plow's mess. Camoed container with just a log.
This area was known as Stephens Mill (or just Stephens) and Fish Lake. It was the site of one of the state's largest lumber companies in the late 1880's and was a boom town. The Detroit and Bay City Railroad used to come right near this intersection. This rail line connected downtown Lapeer at the depot on Nepessing Street next to the park. The waypoint marked with this cache is the location of the first one room school, most likely just a log shanty. A frame one was rebuilt and still stands today on the corner of Fish Lake and Vernor Roads. Stephens Mill was platted in 1871 and named for Henry Stephens, the owner of Stephens, Currier and Townsend Lumber Company, he was also partners with a gentleman by the name of Mellens. The post office opened in 1872 and was closed in 1883, but reopened between 1886 to 1887. Henry Stephens got his start in Almont, where he was a merchant. He gained financial backing to start lumbering lands in Lapeer County, which in time expanded to northern Michigan, in St. Helen. There were other lumber companies in this area, those of D. Goodrich, F. & J. Moore, John Copeland, A.A. Sage, N. Holland and a Mr. Curtis, who had his camp on Fish Lake Road, north of Vernor, today known as the Kile Tree Farm. J. Dee Ellis writes: "The mill was operating before the railroad spur arrived, and in winter 1879 Stephens employed 400 men and 135 teams. In the seaon of 1880-81 his mill put into Fish Lake 25 million feet of logs at the cost of $1.40 per thousand feet. The magnitude of the business is indicated by the fact that in 1 week in December 1881 over 1,000 letters went to the mill through the Lapeer post office. Thereafter Stephens turned to oak lumber as the pine was depleted, such as oak flooring. The Stephens Mill ended lumbering in late 1883. Since 1870 his workers had cut 270 million feet of pine. In 1879 Little's Camp at Fish Lake cut a tree from which 20 logs were obtained - 10 of them 16 feet long, 5 were 14 feet long, and 5 were 12 feet. They scaled 9,476 feet. In 1886 the Stephens Hotel at Fish Lake stood empty. The interior was the finest in the county, being hardwood throughout, containing 105 rooms, a large ballroom, a dining room which seated 200. A connecting laundry of 2 stories, had inside it a brick oven 8x10 feet inside. There were also 3 cisterns, 2 wells, and a barn that once housed 300 horses. The railway line was torn up around 1890." Rumor has it there's a lot of mill equipment in the bottom of Fish Lake, but no one in recent years has found any (permission to seek them out would be needed from MDNR and/or EMU). To this day sawdust can be found in piles on the ground or in the lake. At least a dozen men died by falling through the ice on Fish Lake and area lakes. The only structures known that remain of the lumber camps are a couple of houses north of this cache.
Congrats to *S&M* for [FTF] and SuperK9 and GMA56 for [STF]