Of brook trout, stewardship & property taxes

By Mike VanBuren
From the Early May 2014 edition of The North Woods Call

     In 1895—during the second presidency of Grover Cleveland—Albert Rosenberg established the Spring Brook Trout Hatchery on nearly five acres of a geologic basin in northern Kalamazoo County surrounded by high hills.
     It was an era when the last of Michigan’s majestic white pines were being toppled and shipped to the region’s sawmills, and conservationists were becoming concerned about man’s negative impact on the land and natural resources.
     Rosenberg’s new hatchery was located in Section 19 of Richland Township, not far from where pioneer settler Benjamin Cummings—purportedly the inventor of the American version of the circular saw—platted the village of Bridgewater in 1837.
   I can’t say for sure whether Rosenberg’s motivations were conservation or capitalism, but he erected a two-story home on the site and cut down tamarack, elm, ash and other trees that were on the land.  He built a 209-foot dam —flooding about three-quarters of an acre—and excavated eight ponds  in the mucky soil, all by hand labor. Ditches were dug to carry water from springs that were uncovered.
    Rosenberg was apparently learning by doing during those early years and consequently suffered numerous setbacks.  He reportedly had varying degrees of success with brook and rainbow trout, but many adjustments had to be made along the way and new ponds dug. (For a more complete accounting of the struggles Rosenberg experienced as a commercial trout hatchery proprietor, see his testimony before the Fourth International Fishery Congress of 1908 on Page 3 of this edition).
     The total history of the Spring Brook Trout Hatchery is somewhat lost to the ages—at least I haven’t discovered much other written documentation yet.  But the facility has been a lifelong curiosity for me, because I grew up virtually next door to the property and often explored it with my neighborhood friends during those halcyon days of our youth.
     My earliest memories are from the late 1950s, when a local business executive named Russell Scott owned maybe 100 acres of the surrounding land.  I don’t recall whether Mr. Scott actually tried to raise fish there, but I do remember an old caretaker living in a small shack at the edge of one of the ponds.  Albert Rosenberg’s wood-framed house—which had already been abandoned by the time my father grew up in the same neighborhood during the 1930s and 1940s—was long gone and few remnants remained.
     My friends and I always referred to the old hatchery as “Scotty’s ponds” and, throughout the 1960s and into the 1970s, we loved to hike through the woods and along the two-track roads that wound through the trees.  To us, it was “The Big Wild”—several dozen acres of unattended land with an absentee owner, which we could pretty much explore at will.  Every trip to the dormant trout ponds brought fresh, new adventure.
     Wading in the old ponds wasn’t much of a thrill, though, because they were filled with silt, rotting vegetation and assorted creepy objects that passersby over the years had tossed into the water.  You never knew what you were going to step on when you entered the ponds with bare feet that would promptly descend a foot or so into the dark, mucky bottom.
     One of my boyhood chums—the Tom Sawyer to my Huck Finn—purchased the property several years ago and has set about trying to restore the natural habitat, and preserve the wetlands and forest.  A hunter, fisherman and conservationist of the first order, he has worked incessantly on restoring the ponds, managing wildlife and protecting the landscape.  For this privilege, he pays an excessive amount of property taxes each year—not to mention increasingly expensive fees to hunt and fish in the State of Michigan.
     He gets no breaks from the massive bureaucracy that governs such matters, even though he has spent thousands of his own dollars to actively steward the natural resources for which he has assumed responsibility.
      Modern liberal-progressives probably feel this is a just and fair system.  After all, shouldn’t any individual who can afford to own and care for such property in the first place be taxed disproportionately so that his perceived wealth can be redistributed to others who can’t?
     To me, that’s faulty thinking.  Regularly taxing someone for a possession he bought and paid for with his own hard-earned money seems the height of economic injustice.  Does a property owner’s personal vote in millage elections carry more weight than that of those who own no property and thus are not adversely affected by increased taxes on such assets?  No, but it probably should.
     Instead, the property owner—no matter his own economic situation (he may be a retiree on a fixed income)—will quickly lose his investment to the government if the tax man is not satisfied.
     I’m not sure exactly what it would be—perhaps just a flat tax on income—but there needs to be a more fair and equitable way of funding schools, townships and assorted other government expenditures that today rely so heavily on property taxes for continuation.
   Albert Rosenberg’s Spring Brook Trout Hatchery was located along the former C, K & S (Chicago, Kalamazoo & Saginaw) railroad line, which once carried visitors out from town to visit the facility and have picnics on the grounds.
     Over the years, some have referred to the railroad as the “Cuss, Kick & Swear.”  And that’s precisely how many Michigan land and home owners react when they receive their ever-increasing tax-assessment notices each summer and winter.
     Wouldn’t it be better if our public tax system was less punitive, and did more to encourage the ownership and active conservation of private land?