Mullett Lake

About

Mullett Lake, Michigan — 1923 Aloha State Park, Inland Waterway, Cheboygan, 16,630 Acres. Long before surveyors and sawmills, Mullett Lake was homeland to the Anishinaabe — the Ojibwe and Odawa. As one of the largest inland lakes in Michigan's Lower Peninsula, it formed a link in the famous Inland Waterway connecting Cheboygan to Petoskey. The 1836 Treaty of Washington ceded the area to the United States, but the Little Traverse Bay Bands of Odawa Indians maintains cultural connections and treaty-protected rights to this watershed to this day.

John Mullett arrived to chart the country between 1840 and 1843, conducting a federal land survey that left his name fixed to the water. Decades later the timber came down. From the 1870s through the 1920s, Mullett Lake's watershed was logged to feed the 1880-1910 Cheboygan County white-pine industry, the 1890-1910s Michigan Central Railway expansion, and the 1890-1920s Lake Michigan lumber trade. The Topinabee and Mullett Lake sawmills operated from 1885 to 1910, the Mullett Lake logging drives ran from 1890 to 1910, and Cheboygan County timber operations continued from 1895 into the 1920s. The 1910 exhaustion of the white-pine stands, the 1915 start of state forestry conservation, and the 1920s establishment of Aloha State Park together brought large-scale logging to an end.

That park arrived in 1923, when the Michigan State Parks Commission established Aloha State Park along the lake's eastern shore. The lake draws its major inflows from the Pigeon River — which drains the 113,000-acre Pigeon River Country State Forest — along with the Cheboygan River and the Indian River. Hydrology drew official attention early: the 1920s Michigan Department of Conservation streamflow surveys, the 1924 USGS Mullett Lake outlet gauging station, and the 1930s CCC stream-crossing surveys formed the first comprehensive assessments of the system.

Water levels here are no accident of nature. The Cheboygan Dam, managed by the DNR, holds the lake and the Cheboygan River to their target elevations. For decades that balance leaned on the Great Lakes Tissue hydroelectric facility, which played a key role in level management until its shutdown in September 2023. The dam and its downstream chain remain the mechanism that keeps this working lake at its designed levels.

Modern recovery began in earnest in 2015. The Mullett Lake Preservation Association, working with the Little Traverse Bay Bands of Odawa Indians and Michigan EGLE, has addressed more than a century of logging, agricultural, and developmental impacts. Streambank stabilization ran from 2015 to 2024, native fish restocking — including lake sturgeon and walleye — from 2017 to 2024, and Aloha State Park improvements from 2020 to 2024. Today the lake supports the Inland Waterway National Scenic Byway and stands as one of Michigan's premier walleye and pike fisheries — surveyed in the nineteenth century, dammed and parkland-rimmed in the twentieth, and stewarded into the twenty-first.