White River Watershed Project

Watershed Tidbits:

• In early French maps the White River is shown as Ouabisipi ou R. Blanche. The Ottawa's name for the river was waba-sippi (meaning White River).  Suspended clay particles from marl deposits cause the river to appear "whitish".  
  
• In 1945, the Huron National Forest and the Manistee National Forest were administratively combined into the Huron-Manistee National Forest, a forest "united by rivers."  The Huron-Mansitee National Forest makes up 23% of the watershed. 
  
• A little over half of the watershed is forested (about 200,000 acres). 
  
• In 1975 the White River became the fifth state river designated under the Natural Rivers Act.   
  
• The watershed contains a number of rare and endangered habitats including coastal plain marshes, bogs, dry sand prairies, barrens, wet meadows, and mesic prairies.