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You probably know that Manchester Township along with neighboring Norvell Township is home to Watkins Lake State Park and County Preserve, Michigan’s 103rd state park as well as the first state park in Michigan to be jointly managed with a county recreation agency. What you might not know is that the park is home to an almost century-old survey marker that was lost for 75 years and found by Manchester’s own Janice Kessler.
While there are all sorts of survey markers, this survey marker came about because of the Great Depression.
During the Great Depression, the Civil Works Administration, a New Deal Program, provided immediate, temporary relief by directly employing millions of unemployed people for manual labor during the winter of 1933–34. One unemployed group was engineers. In the fall of 1933, the U.S. Coast and Geodetic Survey Bureau was asked to head up a limited-term project to employ out-of-work engineers in surveying the country…