As the last ice sheet melted fourteen thousand years ago, the region was a barren landscape dotted with mounds of gravel and sand, while meltwater rushed off the glaciers and gouged new paths. Huge blocks of ice left behind by the receding glacier lay buried beneath rocks, gravel, and sand, and as they slowly melted under that insulating layer, water-filled depressions formed Hamilton and Ball Lake as kettle lakes, typically deep with uneven bottoms. One anecdotal story recalled thousands of buffalo coming to Ball Lake for water and making many paths down the seep banks on the northwest side, with those buffalo paths said to remain visible. Hamilton Lake, originally called Fish Lake, varies from fifteen to sixty-two feet deep, is fed principally by Black Creek, and drains through Fish Creek. Ball Lake covers seventy-eight acres, drops steeply from its shoreline, and stands four feet lower than its historic depth because of the Cameron Ditch constructed on its east end, a route now followed by the Fish Creek Trail. The water exiting Hamilton Lake became a source of energy for sawmills and gristmills that supplied lumber and ground wheat and corn for the young Otsego Township; dams were built there during the eighteen thirty-six to eighteen forty time frame, and a mill built in the eighteen fifties primarily ground grain and at one point powered a generator that gave Hamilton its first electricity before farm electricity and on-farm grinding made mills obsolete. Hamilton Lake also experienced numerous floods, including one in eighteen forty-one that washed out the dam, killed one man, and injured the mill owner, as well as major floods in nineteen oh three, nineteen thirteen, and nineteen twenty, and another in nineteen ninety-six after a nine-inch rain threatened the spillway. For several decades, Hamilton Lake was also an active resort area with hotels and cabins offering canoeing, swimming, and dances.