GEORGETOWN TOWNSHIP, Mich. — Steep and shaped like a bowl, Charlie's Dump is the definitive snow day spot for children in Georgetown Township. It's a boneyard for broken sleds, a cathedral for catching air. On any given day with snow on the ground in West Michigan, it's likely that bundled-up boys and girls are hitting its slopes, perhaps bruising their tailbones.
It's origin, though, is mostly a mystery.
"How'd that dump get there?"
For years, Gene Kort and Ken Williams, a pair of historians with the Jenison Historical Association, have faithfully fielded this question from patrons of Rosewood Park, where Charlie's Dump is located.
"Trying to keep this stuff alive," Kort said.
A man named Charlie
Charles Montague, the man whose legend lives on in Charlie's Dump, was born on Dec. 22, 1872. A farmer by trade, he and his wife, Eliza, lived on a plot of land in Georgetown Township. He likely grew corn and wheat, according to the historical association.
"He was just there," Kort said. "He was just Charlie."
Charlie also ran the Jenison Ferry and leased a gravel pit on his property to Ottawa County, allowing the municipality to use it for road repairs. In exchange, he likely had his local taxes waived.
"He helped his neighbors and his neighbors helped him," Williams said. "There are stories we've read of [him and his wife] going to the church picnic with a roll of dimes."
"Back then, a dime meant something," he said.
If a neighborhood kid knocked on Charlie's front door, they'd likely get a piece of hard candy. In return, the mothers of these children delivered him homemade cookies.
"The feeling was mutual," Kort said. "Times were different back then. You knew everybody and you knew their background."
Charlie's Dump
A collection of antique sleds are stored in the attic of the Jenison Historical Museum, including a red single-runner sled from Kort's childhood, a "suicide toboggan."
"Sit down, put your legs out and away you go," he said. "You couldn't steer. The only way you could steer would be to fall off."
In the mid-1900s, when winter fell in Georgetown Township, Charlie's gravel pit doubled as a community sledding hill. People would go down it with whatever they could find. Afterward, they'd often abandon these scraps of plastic and metal, leaving them on the property even after the snow melted.
"Pretty soon it was refrigerators and stoves and everything else," Kort said. "That's how it got the name."
From pit to park
On Sept. 12, 1970, Charles Montague passed away at 98 years old. He was a friend to all.
"He was just an all-around nice guy," Kort said. "He was just Charlie."
In the years after his death, the Montague property changed hands multiple times between the Jenison public school system, the Ottawa County Drain Commission and Georgetown Township.
The dump fell further into decrepitude, becoming a "catch-call for cast-offs," according to a 1983 Grand Valley Advance article, until fencing was put up around the property.
"It wasn't Charlie's Dump while he was alive," Williams said. "He kept it clean."
Eventually, the pit was cleaned up and dug out, allowing Georgetown Township to open Rosewood Park on the property in 1987.
Rosewood Park
Today, a splash pad and playground sit atop Charlie's Dump. In the summer, youth soccer games are held at the bottom of the former gravel pit, and sleds still fly down its sides in the winter.
Rosewood Park is a promise that the late farmer's generosity will be passed down to the generations that play there.
"I think Charlie has to be really happy," Williams said.
"The way it’s fixed up now, I just love it," Kort said. "They're taking something I can remember as a kid that wasn't really nice, and the kids today have got it really nice."
