Project Scroll Research Note 2026-30
Deadwood Lake: Diamond Lake, Cass County, Michigan, under an older name in Blois’s Gazetteer of 1838
Summary
John T. Blois’s Gazetteer of the State of Michigan (Detroit, 1838) names no Diamond Lake in Cass County. Its county entry lists the lakes as “Pleasant lake, Stone lake, Deadwood lake.” It places Geneva, “a small settlement situated on the north side of Deadwood Lake,” “2½ miles east of Cassopolis,” and Young’s Prairie, “in Penn township, Cass county, on the north-east of Deadwood lake.” The county history of 1882 says that Geneva, the first county seat, was “laid out on the north bank of Diamond lake,” and Glover (1906) that its plat of 1832 “shows that the village was laid out on the north side of Diamond lake.” Young’s Prairie lies north-east of Diamond Lake. By this reading Diamond Lake was still called Deadwood Lake in the late 1830s.
The record
John T. Blois, Gazetteer of the State of Michigan (Detroit: Sydney L. Rood, 1838), Cass County
“Lakes.—Pleasant lake, Stone lake, Deadwood lake.”
Internet Archive · See the record
Blois, Gazetteer (1838), “Geneva”
“Geneva, a small settlement situated on the north side of Deadwood Lake, in Cass county. It has an iron foundery and 2 stores. The country around it is very heavily timbered. Distant 2½ miles east of Cassopolis, and 178 from Detroit.”
Internet Archive · See the record
Blois, Gazetteer (1838), “Young’s Prairie”
“Young’s Prairie, in Penn township, Cass county, on the north-east of Deadwood lake.”
Internet Archive · See the record
History of Cass County, Michigan (Chicago: Waterman, Watkins & Co., 1882), the county seat
“the plat of the village of Geneva, laid out on the north bank of Diamond lake by Dr. H. H. Fowler”
Internet Archive · See the record
What it changes
An older name for Diamond Lake, Deadwood Lake, is recovered from the state gazetteer of 1838, which names no Diamond Lake in the county.
Limits
The identification is a reading: Blois never says that Deadwood Lake and Diamond Lake are one lake. It rests on Geneva’s position on the north shore and on Young’s Prairie to the north-east, and on the absence of any Diamond Lake from Blois’s list of the county’s lakes.
What we searched before calling it new
Blois’s Gazetteer (1838); the county histories of 1875, 1882 and 1906; the Diamond Lake Association’s history timeline; web searches for “Deadwood Lake” with Cass County, Cassopolis and Diamond Lake (October 2026). None notes the older name.
Our standard for calling a finding new is set out in How we research, and how we weigh each kind of record in Scrollsigns.
“New” means new to print as far as we can tell. If you know of an earlier publication, tell us and we will credit it here and raise the note’s version.
Works cited
Earlier work, catalogues and databases named in this note, besides the records quoted above.
- Michael Urbanski, “Cassopolis in 1846,” Project Scroll (2026). https://projectscroll.com/news/cassopolis-in-1846/
- L. H. Glover, A Twentieth Century History of Cass County, Michigan (Chicago, 1906). https://archive.org/details/arh7771.0001.001.umich.edu
The full story
The finding is set out in context, with the rest of its sources, in Cassopolis in 3D: A Village Through Time, 1846 to Today. In the discoveries register:
How to cite this note
Michael Urbanski, “Deadwood Lake: Diamond Lake, Cass County, Michigan, under an older name in Blois’s Gazetteer of 1838,” Project Scroll Research Note 2026-30, version 1 (5 November 2026), https://projectscroll.com/discoveries/notes/2026-30/. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.23968691.
BibTeX
@techreport{urbanski202630,
author = {Urbanski, Michael},
orcid = {0009-0006-8183-5828},
title = {{Deadwood Lake: Diamond Lake, Cass County, Michigan, under an older name in Blois's Gazetteer of 1838}},
institution = {Project Scroll},
type = {Project Scroll Research Note},
number = {2026-30},
year = {2026},
month = {nov},
url = {https://projectscroll.com/discoveries/notes/2026-30/},
doi = {10.5281/zenodo.23968691},
note = {Version 1}
}