Barney’s Lake

LakeGNIS 620628

Coordinates

45.7123° N, 85.5594° WGoogle Maps: Barney’s LakeDownload KML

Eras

Modern era

Concepts

toponymyfishingenvironmentconservationgeologysoilshydrologywetlandsforestswildlifeanimalsbirds

Within

Beaver Island

Media

Beaver Island History Map, 1978 revision · Plat of Big Beaver Island, 1901 · Plat of the north end of Beaver Island, 1930s

Summary

Barneys Lake is a named inland lake in the north-central interior of Beaver Island, about 2.4 km southwest of Font Lake. GNIS records its official form as “Barneys Lake” and “Barney Lake” as a spelling variant of the same name, not a superseded former name, and attributes the name to Barney O’Donnell, an early settler said to have owned the surrounding land. Helen Collar’s notes independently identify “Barney of Barney’s Lake”, place the original O’Donnell farm there, and transcribe an 1873 federal land entry on the north shore. No dated naming act has been found, but the attribution no longer rests on GNIS alone. Most of the lake and its shoreline are now held by Little Traverse Conservancy as the Barney’s Lake Nature Preserve.

History

The 1978 Historical Map also says the lake was called Long Lake in Mormon times.¹ That alias remains map-only in the sources checked. Farmer’s 1853 map labels Font and Gennesareth Lakes but does not label Barney’s Lake as Long Lake, and no held Strang-era newspaper or gazetteer passage located in this audit supplies the name. It is retained as a research claim rather than added to former_names.

The earliest held record of organized attention to the lake is a July 1960 notice that state Institute for Fisheries Research staff were collecting fish and food samples from Lakes Geneserath, Fox, “Barncoys,” and Font as part of a Department of Conservation lake-improvement program — the OCR’s “Barncoys” is a garbled rendering of Barney’s, and the survey was a state project independent of Central Michigan University.² In 1971 a student at the CMU Biological Station, Bill Kuhn, separately asked anglers at Barney’s Lake to record the fish they caught for his own independent study.³ State regulation reached the lake again in January 1975, when it was listed among Charlevoix County waters exempted from the northern pike size limit.⁴

After the 1963 deer season, Frank Neer and Frank O’Donnell found deer that had broken through the lake ice; volunteers organized a rescue with planks and rope, but the two deer they found had already drowned, while tracks suggested two others had escaped.⁵ Two decades later, on July 4, 1983, the abandoned O’Donnell House at the lake, described by the Beacon as “one of the largest” houses on the island and a longtime landmark that had sheltered wildlife since its abandonment, burned down; islander Francis LaFreniere recalled visiting to make horseradish the O’Donnells grew there. A separate grass fire near the lake the next day was unrelated.⁶

An April 1987 Beacon article on loon protection named Barney’s one of five island lakes with historically documented loon nesting, along with Egg, Font, Fox, and Green’s, and singled out Barney’s and Font for the highest nesting success, while noting both lakes’ nest sites were unprotected from boaters.⁷

Conservation ownership followed. A July 1989 Beacon article reports “Barney O’Donnell’s Farm and SE Portion of Barney’s Lake Deeded to Little Traverse Conservancy,” with public-access and conservation restrictions, and recounts the O’Donnell family’s history at the site.⁸ A dedication on July 21, 1990 launched a new Conservancy program to protect Beaver Island natural areas, describing the preserve as donated by the O’Donnell family; CMU graduate student Elizabeth Rosenow led a field trip on the day’s natural features.⁹ The Conservancy’s current website instead dates the original donation to 1988, with further land added in 2007, 2014, and 2025; this article does not reconcile the one-year discrepancy between the contemporary Beacon account and the Conservancy’s later retrospective.¹⁰ In 1992 the Conservancy led a day-long ecology program for Beaver Island elementary students at the preserve.

Geography

Barneys Lake sits in Beaver Island’s northern interior, 2.4 km southwest of Font Lake and 4.8 km southwest of Saint James. Two unreconciled figures exist for its size: the 2023 Master Plan gives about 45 acres,¹¹ while an independently computed polygon overlay of the current OSM lake feature measures 0.131457 km2 (about 32.5 acres) in EPSG:6933.¹² The Master Plan calls the lake “highly eutrophic,” with a limited yellow perch and rock bass fishery, past stocking of largemouth and smallmouth bass, and continuing habitat for bass, northern pike, and sunfish; a low-impact Conservancy launch sits on the southeastern shore.¹¹ Most of the lake is owned by Little Traverse Conservancy, with a small southern portion under other ownership.¹¹

A 1999 Michigan Natural Features Inventory survey recorded loons at the lake (one pair in May, five individuals in June) among four inland lakes visited that year, alongside Font, Fox, and Lake Geneserath, a sampling rather than a complete census.¹³ Soil, wetland, and vegetation overlays place it among Deer Park–Dune and Kalkaska–Leelanau soil units and a reconstructed beech–sugar maple–hemlock forest margin: regional map context, not parcel-level fact.¹²

Names

GNIS carries two forms for feature 620628: “Barneys Lake,” the official name entered through the USGS’s 1976-1981 Geographic Names Phase I compilation, and “Barney Lake,” recorded as a variant of the same name rather than a name it replaced.¹⁴ That distinction matters: “Barney Lake” is a variant spelling still in current use, not a name the lake once bore and later lost; checked against the held GNIS variant-names table, “Barney Lake” is correctly classified as a variant, and no former name was found for this feature.¹⁵

GNIS’s feature-description record further attributes the name to “Barney O’Donnell, early settler and owner of the land around the lake.”¹⁶ Collar’s biographical file supplies an independent identity bridge and a transcribed 1873 north-shore land record.¹⁷ What the Beacon establishes, across 1963, 1983, and 1989 reporting, is an O’Donnell family farm and house at the lake for at least a quarter-century, ending in a 1989 conservation gift described in the newspaper as “Barney O’Donnell’s Farm.”⁵⁶⁸ That is consistent with the naming claim, although neither the compilation nor the newspaper supplies the original naming act.

Evidence and limits

The naming attribution is supported by GNIS and Collar’s biographical and land notes, but the underlying patent and a dated naming act have not been checked. The lake’s acreage is reported differently by two held sources and not reconciled. The 1988-versus-1989 date for the Conservancy’s original land gift is likewise not reconciled between a contemporary newspaper account and the Conservancy’s later retrospective description.

Significance

Barneys Lake recurs across six decades of the Beacon as a working part of island life — a state fisheries survey, licensed pike fishing, a wildlife rescue, a family farm and its loss by fire, and, from the late 1980s, an organized conservation preserve with public access and a documented loon population. It is one of two island lakes (with Font) singled out in 1987 for the archipelago’s highest recorded loon-nesting success.

Added 28 July 2026 · revised 7 August 2026. Recent changes