Hartwick Pines: The Last Old Growth

Michigan was once blanketed by white pines so vast the loggers called it inexhaustible. They were wrong. By the early twentieth century, nearly every old-growth pine in the Lower Peninsula had been cut. The forty-nine acres at Hartwick Pines are among the only survivors.

In nineteen twenty-seven, a widow named Karen Hartwick bought over eight thousand acres here and donated them to Michigan as a memorial to her husband, Edward Hartwick, who died in World War One. The old-growth stand she protected is one of the last remnants of its kind in the Lower Peninsula, with white pines pushing a hundred and sixty feet. The Civilian Conservation Corps arrived in nineteen thirty-four and thirty-five, built the logging museum. Walking into those trees now feels like stepping into a forest that should have covered everything north of Grayling. In nineteen twenty-seven the grove was eighty-five acres. On November eleventh, nineteen forty, the Armistice Day Blizzard and other storms blew down about thirty-six acres of old trees, which is how it shrank to forty-nine. The survivors are estimated at three hundred fifty to three hundred seventy-five years old, and the biggest are more than four feet across at chest height. Before Karen Hartwick's gift, the Salling Hansen Lumber Company had heavily logged the property in the eighteen eighties and nineties. A loop trail of about one and a quarter miles takes you through the old growth. Much of the rest of the park is second growth, because the Civilian Conservation Corps planted many of its trees in the nineteen thirties. At the logging museum, two replica logging camp buildings stand beside outdoor logging equipment, and on summer event days an enclosed steam-powered sawmill runs. The size of the stumps just outside the grove tells you what was lost.