The Pottawatomie had a village near here around 1800 or before. Then around 1831 white settlers moved in and established the village of Spring Arbour in that spot. The village was latter moved around 1845 to it's present location.
Students from the collage there would go to the nearby small Bateman Lake to cut ice during the winter. In1872 the Air Line Railroad built a line,which ran from Jackson to Niles, through the wetlands south of that lake.
It was that action which ended in the creation of Lime Lake. A man out fishing noticed that the wetlands had large deposits of Marl which was used to make cement and fertilizer. He and friends bought the land and started a company to remove the Marl and were quickly bought out by the Peerless Portland Cement Company. So in1903 Peerless brought in their large stem-powered dredges and began to remove the Marl on a large scale.
This effort required many men and much machinery to bring all that in and to be able to take the Marl too their processing center, so they built a side spur off the Air Line down to the lake.
The dredges had been mounted on floating cement barges and they brought those in too the dock at the end of the spur so that up to four rail cars could be loaded on to them.
The barges headed out into the lake, dredged up the Marl loading it into the rail cars. Then it was back to the dock to off-load the full cars and take on four empty ones.
This process ran six days a week, sun up to sun down, from April to November, for thirty years. They stopped when the cost of processing the Marl with coal became to expensive.
What they left was a 96 acre lake 27ft deep which is now called Lime Lake, not Bateman Lake. The new larger lake is divided by the rail line.
What you see today is the cement foundation of the spur, and chunks of coal left from the steam trains and dredges. The old station, bunkhouses, and other buildings are gone. The cement barge is at the bottom of the lake.
There is no physical cache here so to log your find post a picture of your cache signing implement in your hand with the old dock area out in the lake as background. If you are part of a group you still must fulfill this requirement!
Virtual Rewards 3.0 - 2022-2023
This Virtual Cache is part of a limited release of Virtuals created between March 1, 2022 and March 1, 2023. Only 4,000 cache owners were given the opportunity to hide a Virtual Cache. Learn more about Virtual Rewards 3.0 on the Geocaching Blog.