GREENLAND TOWNSHIP — There’s mystery water flowing from a hose that sticks out of a hole in the ground in an Upper Peninsula ghost town. And people in the area have been drinking it for years.
“It is probably the purest water you’d ever taste,” said Ron Store, a 56-year-old Ontonagon County commissioner. “You can put this stuff in a glass jar, sit it on your porch for a month and it’s not going to turn green. That’s how good this stuff is.”
This water is found in Lake Mine, a ghost town that sits inside the boundaries of Greenland Township, just east of the Lake Superior coast in the western Upper Peninsula. The well it comes from is little more than a cluster of old concrete pilings poking out of the ground in remembrance of something that once stood there, and in the middle is a hole that’s framed by a few blocks of wood and topped by a metal grate. Underneath is an old pipe with a few valves and spigots, and from there the hose emerges.
It's just off a trail in the woods, where it’s shrouded by vegetation in the summer, hidden by snow during winter, hard to spot regardless.
For a century, the only people aware of it were those who lived nearby and drank it, and who passed down knowledge of this secret well in the woods. “Everybody around here knew, and everybody would use it quietly,” Store said.
That changed when the state found out.