For my Big Project with my camera club this year I'm choosing to do a Year at Asylum Lake. It's the place I walk most mornings. I take a lot of photos there. This year I really want to put some of the photos into a journal of sorts of how things change throughout the year. I'm hoping to document the year here.
Asylum Lake
I'd like to share a little bit about the nature preserve and its history before I start the actual journal.
Asylum Lake is a 274-acre parcel of land that is owned by Western Michigan University. It is situated in Kalamazoo, Michigan. There are two lakes - one that is accessible, and people are able to walk around, and another that you cannot. The two lakes are joined by a small stream. This land is designated as a Nature Preserve. There are several areas of woods and prairies.
Up until 1887 the land had been used as an orchard and a small-scale dairy farm. In 1887 the land was sold to the state of Michigan and named Colony Farms. The purpose of the farm was for the Michigan Asylum for the Insane to investigate a new style of treatment and care of the mentally ill. The Asylum build a number of cottages to house patients. The state thought that therapeutic farm labour would help patients as they learned to cultivate their own harvest.
There were seven cottages on the land. In 1969 the Colony Farms program was ended and the majority of the structures demolished in 1971. There is little of them that can be seen today.
Western Michigan University acquired the land in 1975 with the restriction that it must be used 'solely for public park, recreation or open space purposes, except that the legislature, by statute, may authorize (WMU) to utilize the property for some other public service'. I'm not entirely sure what is meant by this, but I think that, at some point, WMU hoped to develop the land. Proposed development of the land received a lot of backlash and it led to the creation of the Asylum Lake Preservation Association in 1990.
No comments:
Post a Comment
Thanks for your kind comments.