Good Job Old Dog!

 My comments about the Rouse Simons came from a book that I read some years ago and I was working from memory.  This is one case where the movie was way better than the book, it contained more factual information and was presented in a more professional manner.  There were some typos in the subtitles that the narrator faithfully reproduced when he spoke.  Also, as any boy scout can tell you, flying the American flag at half-mast is not a distress signal, it's a sign of mourning for someone who has recently died.  The actual distress signal is flying the flag upside down.  These are the only two things that I found wrong with the video.  Everything else was top notch.

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The Cheboygan Dam is located right behind the paper mill.  The lock can accommodate boats over 40 feet long and raises them 15 feet above the downstream water level.  It was originally built in the 1860s by the Slack Water Navigation Company, a consortium of logging interests, to facilitate floating logs down the Inland Waterway.  In those days, the present paper mill was a water powered sawmill, and some of the original structure is part of the paper mill complex even unto this day.  At some point the sawmill switched to electric power, which it generated onsite.  Eventually, the dam, lock and generator became owned by Consumer's Power and the electricity was fed into the grid.  Shortly before I moved here, Consumer's sold or gave the site to the state because they said the generator was too small for their purposes.  They still maintain a garage for their trucks there, but the state owns everything else except the flume that runs under the paper mill.  

The generator had been removed before I came to work at the mill, but a new one was installed by Procter & Gamble around 1980.  At the time, it generated about 10% of the power we used, but only when it was operating.  Like the Alverno Dam, the builders of the Cheboygan Dam agreed to maintain the water level upstream at a certain level forever, and this contract was binding on its successors. There is a sensor in Mullet Lake that automatically shuts off the generator when the water level falls below a certain point.  It's kind of hard to restart the generator after an automatic shutdown, so the operators try to anticipate it and shut it down manually, then they don't start it up again until they determine there is enough water in the system to run it for at least a day or two.

There are only two bridges crossing the river in Cheboygan, the State Street drawbridge and the Lincoln Avenue Bridge.  It's not really an inconvenience for us because there is no direct route to town from Beaglesonia anyway.  Lincoln Avenue dead ends in the swamp, so we have to either go north to State Street or south to Van Yea Road, thence north on Lafayette to Lincoln Avenue.  It's only about a 15-minute drive either way.

Abrahamson Road is so named because it goes to the old Abrahamson farm.  It continues as a two-track after that but soon peters out in the swamp.

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Is Festivus a real thing?  I remember it from the old Seinfeld show and thought it was fictitious, but the Weather Channel showed a Festivus greeting on one of its displays this morning.

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I read something once about the St. Patrick's Brigade in National Geographic, but the Wiki article goes into more detail.