About

Silver Lake is a part of the Dead River watershed near Champion, Michigan in Marquette County. The first dam on Silver Lake was built in 1896. The Cleveland-Cliffs Iron Company raised the dam in 1944. In 1988, the Upper Peninsula Power Company took over the dam and still operates it today. The Silver Lake Dam failed in 2003, leading to massive flooding and property damage. It was rebuilt in 2008. 

This collection is an artificial collection of digital government documents put together by the Lydia Olson Library at Northern Michigan University and made accessible online by the Central Upper Peninsula and Northern Michigan University Archives. The original documents are not available at the archives. This collection focuses on the rebuilding of Silver Lake Dam after its failure in 2003. It contains relatively little about the failure itself. It documents concerns about the engineering of the rebuilt dam as well as concerns about the environmental and wildlife impact of the dam. 

See the full finding aid here. 

For more information about hydroelectric projects on the Dead River watershed and the Silver Lake Dam failure, see the Dead River Regional Documents Collection. The Au Train Regional Documents Collection and the Escanaba River Regional Documents Collection also contain items related to hydroelectric projects in the Upper Peninsula.