Macatawa Watershed

A watershed is an area of land that drains to a common point. For the Macatawa Watershed that point is Lake Macatawa. One of the smallest watersheds in Michigan, the Macatawa Watershed has an area of approximately 175 square miles (about 110,000 acres). Lake Macatawa, formerly known as Black Lake, has a surface area of about 1800 acres. The Lake is about four and a half miles long. The narrowest width, 870 feet, is at Superior Point, the site of an 1830’s lumber mill and best known now as the site of Marigold Lodge. The widest part of Lake Macatawa is 6035 feet at Big Bay. The average depth of the Lake is a comparatively shallow 12 feet; the maximum depth is 38 feet in Big Bay. With a ratio of land surface area to water surface area in the Watershed of 60:1 Lake Macatawa is small when compared with similar freshwater lakes in West Michigan.

Lake Macatawa contains approximately seven billion gallons of water, with a weight of approximately 30 million tons. The Lake drains into Lake Michigan through an artificial channel first dug by Dutch Settlers around the time of the Civil War; the Lake’s natural outlet was at about the northern end of Holland State Park. The channel, dredged with increasing frequency by the United States Army Corps of Engineers to allow entry of commercial shipping into Lake Macatawa, keeps the lake at the same level as Lake Michigan, somewhere around 580 feet above sea level. Approximately 35 billion gallons of water flows from Lake Macatawa through the channel and into Lake Michigan each year. Some of this water eventually flows through the St Lawrence River to the Atlantic Ocean.