What's The Deal With Charlie's Dump?

Charlie's Dump, the Georgetown Soccer Bowl, and Rosewood Park all describe the same common area in Jenison, Michigan, at the northeast corner of 20th Ave. and Rosewood St.  It's, simply put, a giant pit surrounded by residential subdivisions (and lately, a nice playground).  It was our local sledding hill.  It was where we'd go in the winters.  Every year, it seemed, one kid would come to school with a broken arm.  There were low-key "gangs" that would push and shove you if you went down the wrong side of the 4-sided structure.  And, late at nights, the bad kids (you know, the ones who would smoke cigarettes underneath the Rush Creek bridge on 12th Ave. or ride BMX bikes behind the Pizza Hut on Baldwin) would tip over the port-a-potties and push them down the hill.

Starting at the rim and going down the hill, there's a bump about halfway down that served as a launch ramp for kids on sleds.  The really cool kids could manipulate their sleds mid-air, doing a 180 or something similar.  As the pit sits, it aligns nicely with the cardinal directions:  The east side has the parking lot, the south side abuts Rosewood St., the west side abuts 20th Ave., and the north side abutted a small stretch of woods (though, after a mid-2010's renovation, it's a nice park area these days).

I mentioned about one kid per year coming into class with a broken arm from sledding - there was, at one point, a tire or some debris buried in the southeast corner, that kids would run into and hurt themselves...an easy mistake after a mid-winter's snowfall.

The title of this post asks "What's the deal with Charlie's Dump?"  The urban myths and legends about this random-ass hole in the ground were that a dude named Charlie had a garbage dump there.

I was bummed to find out that that's entirely accurate.  I really, really wanted to find some salacious details, perhaps a family feud or something, but came up short.  According to this blog from a nice Hudsonville School employee (go Eagles!), a man named Charlie Montague owned the property, sold it to the Township for gravel rights, then turned the property into a stormwater retention basin, as seen in the orange blob below taken from the Michigan Stormwater Retention Inventory website:

My interest in this was piqued when I found the following image from the Ottawa County GIS Mapping site showing the pit itself being owned by the Ottawa County Water Resources Commission, and the surrounding road-level areas (that's the parking lot and the park) being owned by the Township.  Also note the blue streak along the western edge, which is the existing drainage structure.

Another screengrab, this time from the USDA's Web Soil Survey.  The center blob shows gravel, and the surrounding areas are topsoil.  It can be reasonably ascertained that the "hump" halfway down the hill corresponds with the transition between topsoil and gravel:

Again, I really, really wanted to find out something more fun, something with a little bit of drama maybe.  But no, it was just an old farmer who, like so many others in the area, sold off his land to have it excavated for gravel mining purposes.

You win this time, Urban Legends.