Since 1922, Otsego State Park has offered 62 acres and more than a half mile of sandy beach, with 155 modern campsites. The county was originally called "Okkuddo," an Iroquian word meaning "sickly" or "stomach pain," and in 1843 its name was changed to Otsego, thought to mean "clear water," though Otsego County, New York, established in 1791, interprets the Native American word "Otsego" to mean "place of the rock." Otsego, Michigan, in Allegan County, was settled in 1831 as Pine Creek, and its post office changed its name from Allegan to Otsego in 1835. In 1868, A. A. Dwight brought a crew north to Otsego and built log cabins along Crooked Lake, now Manuka Lake, but hardship drove them away. In the spring of 1869, Charles S. Brink and a crew of 14 men cleared land for farming, and Brink's wife Jane became the county's first white woman. Brink and his men also began serious lumbering operations, building many dams and starting 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, followed by a lumber mill, homes, businesses, a library, town hall, school, and Methodist church. In 1875, Otsego Lake Village became the county seat, but within two years that status moved north to Gaylord. The park's origins began in 1920, when the Otsego County Board of Supervisors appropriated five hundred dollars to buy land for state park purposes. In 1921, a 54-acre tract on the east side of Otsego Lake was identified for a park, and 24 more acres were secured the same year. In 1922, with additional appropriation, the land was purchased except for a strip owned by the Michigan Central Railroad, and Otsego County then deeded the land to the State of Michigan. From 1933 to 1938, the park benefited greatly from Civilian Conservation Corps improvements including the bathhouse, store buildings, campground toilet buildings, shelters, pump house, and roads, and its 1937 master plan remains close to the current layout. Otsego Lake supports a diverse and stable fish community based on both natural reproduction and stocking, with natural reproduction sustaining yellow perch, rock bass, bluegill, smallmouth bass, and black crappie, northern pike increased by rearing marsh operations, and walleye and lake sturgeon dependent on stocking; growth rates indicate the lake is productive and its biological capacity has not been exceeded. In 1942, Doctor Robert Oppenheimer and Doctor Arthur H. Compton chose Otsego Lake State Park as a secluded place to discuss development of the atomic bomb during World War II, meeting at the present beach area. Compton, winner of the 1927 Nobel Prize for Physics and chairman in 1941 of the National Academy of Sciences committee to evaluate the use of atomic energy in war, was instrumental during World War II in creating the first nuclear chain reaction, which led to the first atomic bomb. Oppenheimer, known as the Father of the Atomic Bomb, was the American physicist who served as scientific director of the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico and after the war became chief advisor to the newly created United States Atomic Energy Commission, where he urged international control of nuclear power and sought to avert a nuclear arms race with the Soviet Union.