IXL Museum: The Company Town That Built a Hardwood Empire

The little community of Hermansville along US Two exists almost entirely because of one company: the Wisconsin Land and Lumber Company, which arrived in the eighteen eighties and built a complete world around its mill.

The company's trademarked product was IXL flooring, a high-grade hardwood that sold across the country. The headquarters building, constructed in eighteen eighty-two, served as the company office and headquarters, with a residence upstairs. The workers who cut, milled, and shipped the timber lived in company housing, shopped at company stores, and attended company-sponsored events. It was a self-contained enterprise town in the middle of Michigan's Upper Peninsula cutover forest.

By the time the great timber was gone, Hermansville was left with a beautiful Victorian office building and a population that had largely moved on. The building opened as the IXL Historical Museum in nineteen eighty-two and was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in nineteen ninety-one. It preserves the paper trail and artifacts of the age when Michigan's white pine and hardwood forests were considered inexhaustible.