Big Rock Point takes its name from a large boulder that Native Americans used as a landmark. By at least the mid-nineteenth century, Odawa Indians called the rock Kitcheossening and gathered there each spring after winter dispersal from their summer home at Waganaksing, the area between Harbor Springs and Cross Village. They arrived in canoes carrying sugar, furs, deer skins, prepared venison, bear's oil, bear meat prepared in oil, deer tallow, and sometimes much honey, then crossed the bay in birch bark canoes to return to Waganaksing. In 1999, elders and youth from the Little Traverse Bay Band of Odawa Indians recreated the crossing. Just west of this place, Consumers Power Company, later Consumers Energy, opened the Big Rock Point Nuclear Power Plant in 1962. It was the world's first high-power density boiling water reactor and the fifth commercial nuclear power plant in the U.S. Beginning as a research and development facility intended to show that nuclear power was economical, it also generated electricity and produced cobalt 60 used to treat an estimated 400,000 cancer patients. The American Nuclear Society named it a Nuclear Historic Landmark in 1991, and when it closed in 1997 it was the longest running nuclear plant in the nation. Consumers Energy later restored the site to a natural area.