“Tea Pot Dome.”
Contrary to popular opinion, folklore or the laws of logic in general, this place was not named for the topography of the area or for the famous scandal that occurred during the Harding administration around the turn of the 20th century. The Teapot Dome was actually given its name by the first white man who settled near there and by others passing through who witnessed the same phenomenon.
Lyman Porter owned a farm at what would later become the western outskirts of the hamlet of Paw Paw. He would make regular trips to the rounded blister of scrub sticking up a mile or so down the old Indian road to gather seasoned cords of Dogwood and Siberian Elm for his hearth. He had seen many things of a curious nature there... such like the Potowatami doing strange, silent dances in the grassy meadows; the crickets and cicadas beating unfamiliar rhythms as they whirled. They would take no notice of him as he watched, making him feel garish and insubstantial as a ghost. Sometimes he would find small puddles of marsh water that seemed to glow in the deep thickets and reflect a stormy sky, even on a cloudless day and he often came across odd, flattened out tracts of weeds when hunting squirrel or rabbit there. They were like the depressions deer make when they birth in the fields, save that they were sometimes as big as an acre.
Strange as these things were, more perplexing and most unnerving of all, were the objects he often saw there. They looked like weightless, wheel turned pottery and when Lyman Porter beheld them, his mind would reel and he would become addled and childish as though he were dreaming. Sometimes they would hover and seem to float gently down below the tree line with the movement of Oak leaves on a calm autumn day. At other times, they would hover and dart, just as a Humming bird might at a jumble of honeysuckle. Yet other times, they seemed to be peering at him from on high and he could feel the goose flesh prickling on his arms and neck. They were always skyward, so he could never be sure if they were quite small and very close to him or quite large and very far away. They always looked the same, like polished silver in the daytime and luminous like foxfire in the gloom.
He had never spoken aloud of them to anyone for fear of being shunned as a fool and a lunatic. Then one day a troupe of smithies and potters, who were heading back to the Kalamazoo townstead after a week of fishing at great Lake of Michigan, stopped by to water their ponies and pay their respects. A youngster by the name of Murphy had said almost casually that he had seen what he thought was a flock of ring-necked geese flying in a V toward the southeast until he noticed they had no wings and looked more like flying pebbles. Lyman, who had already fixed the objects in his mind, with the shape of the lid for the silver teakettle he'd bought for his Ila - God rest her sweet soul - at Fort Detroit before heading west, blurted out, "That’s them flying tea pot domes. They're out there all the time."
There had immediately descended a period of profound silence and blank stares, which lasted so long that Lyman Porter began to feel he might be wise to load his Springfield. This hard quiet was broken by laughter of such a robust nature and of such a lengthy duration that Lyman had to join the din in spite of himself.
Other settlers heading west saw the domes and the name caught on. The more synonymous the peculiar title became with the area over the slow march of passing decades, the more its origin faded until, at last, only the name remains. There exists a nebulous area located on the Red Arrow Memorial Highway as it runs east to west between Kalamazoo and Watervaliet identified only by a single unremarkable road sign stating simply and cryptically;
“Tea Pot Dome.”
No one knows why even though such things are seen there still.
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