Since 1922, Otsego State Park has offered 62 acres and more than a half mile of sandy beach. The county was originally called Okkuddo, an Iroquian word meaning sickly or stomach pain, and in 1843 the name was changed to Otsego, thought to mean clear water; Otsego County, New York, established in 1791, interprets Otsego as place of the rock, and Otsego, Michigan, in Allegan County, was settled in 1831 as Pine Creek before its post office changed the name to Otsego in 1835. In 1868, A. A. Dwight brought a crew north and built log cabins along Crooked Lake, now Manuka Lake, but hardship drove them away. In the spring of 1869, Charles S. Brink and 14 men cleared acreage for farming, and Brink's wife Jane became the first white woman in the county. Brink and his men began major lumbering operations, built many dams, and started log drives down the Au Sable River. Those early lumbering days gave way to post-Civil War homesteading and the rise of Otsego Lake Village, where a lumber mill, homes, businesses, a library, town hall, a school, and a Methodist church were built. In 1875, the village became the county seat, but within two years that role moved north to Gaylord. The park's origins began in 1920 when the Otsego County Board of Supervisors appropriated $500 for land for state park purposes; in 1921 a 54-acre tract on the east side of Otsego Lake was identified and 24 more acres were secured; and in 1922, after additional appropriations, the land was purchased except for a strip owned by the Michigan Central Railroad, then deeded by the county to the State of Michigan. From 1933 to 1938, the Civilian Conservation Corps built the bathhouse, store buildings, campground toilet buildings, shelters, pump house, and roads, and its 1937 master plan remains close to the present layout. Otsego Lake has a diverse and stable fish community supported by natural reproduction and stocking, with yellow perch, rock bass, bluegill, smallmouth bass, and black crappie sustained naturally, northern pike enhanced by rearing marsh operations, and walleye and lake sturgeon dependent on stocking. In 1942, Robert Oppenheimer and Arthur H. Compton met at the present beach area to discuss development of the atomic bomb during World War II; Compton had won the 1927 Nobel Prize for Physics, chaired the National Academy of Sciences committee in 1941 to evaluate wartime atomic energy use, and helped create the first nuclear chain reaction, while Oppenheimer later became known as the father of the atomic bomb and scientific director of the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos.