Bulletin of Remarkable Trees Vol. 3 No. 5
Spirit Springs Revisited
I’ve written before about Spirit Springs Sanctuary, located in Southwest Michigan, and my initial visit there in late summer of 2021. You can read more about that here:
To summarize - a number of senior staff at the Arboretum, organized and led by Clarence Godshalk, purchased land in southwest Michigan a few hours from Chicagoland. Clarence Godshalk, my grandfather E . L. Kammerer, Walter Eickhorst, and May Watts all bought tracts of land adjoining each other, planting hundreds of trees and building small vacation cottages. My dad owned his family’s property until the late 1980’s, and our family had been unsure what happened to the land after that.
Last summer, at the tail end of a vacation to the area, I ventured to the site and was ecstatic to find that much of the 80 acres that had belonged to Clarence Godshalk had been acquired by the Southwest Michigan Land Conservancy (SWMLC) and turned into a public nature preserve.
Between last fall and now, I’ve had the pleasure of communicating with Amelia Hansen and Mitch Lettow, two employees of SWMLC, to plan time to re-visit the site, this time with my dad in tow. In mid-September, he and I made the trek from Chicago’s western suburbs to walk the Michigan property and talk with Mitch and Amelia.
This previously forested land was logged heavily in the 1880s, which made way for agriculture to dominate here through the mid 1900s. When my grandfather bought the land with his Arboretum colleagues, it primarily consisted of abandoned cornfields.
Walking with our SWMLC guides, it was fascinating to discuss which plants are surely native to the area and which they suspect had been brought up and planted by my grandfather and his colleagues. My dad has some distinct memories of being enlisted to help plant: he told a story about his father and fellow Arb staff members buying hundreds of White Pines, Scotch Pines, Red Pines, and Spruce from the Department of Natural Resources for almost nothing, and planting them across the various properties. He explained the tedious process: using a tool to carve a large hole in the earth, dunking each tree’s roots into a bucket of mud, then plunking it into the aforementioned hole closing it up and moving on to the next.
On the particularly rainy day that we visited, were able to see bountiful evidence of the fauna that inhabits the land during our hike. Mitch talked about the work they’ve had to do re-routing and supporting the path near the lake due to beavers eagerly terraforming.
We were also lucky enough to find a beautiful box turtle, spotted by Mitch while we walked. He told us that staff and volunteers take photos of the shells, as the patterns are unique to each turtle, which allows tracking of them and their welfare:
Towards the end of our journey, Mitch made a comment that stuck with me: one of their main missions in regards to Spirit Springs is figuring out “what the land wants to be,” due to it’s having been so many things over the years. This transformation is evident through the photos taken by my grandfather in the 1960’s—this same land now is barely recognizable. What began as forests then became cornfields, then was lovingly re-planted and has returned to a semblance of what it may have been to start. A cycle of restoration initiated by my grandfather and his Morton Arboretum colleagues and continued today by the SWMLC.
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Sarah, this looks like such a peaceful place. I love the pictures of trees, the one-of-kind turtle and your dad. How great that the land is being restored to “what it wants to be.”