North Higgins Lake and the CCC: Michigan's Reforestation
Michigan
The forests that line US One Twenty-Seven through northern Michigan today look like they have always been there. They have not. A century ago, the same ground was largely stripped bare, the product of decades of industrial logging that took the white pines and left behind a landscape of stumps, slash, and fire-prone debris. The story of how those forests came back is largely the story of this piece of land near Roscommon, and of a moment in the nineteen thirties when the federal government put desperate men to work on a generation-scale problem.
The Higgins Lake Nursery was established in nineteen oh three by the Michigan State Forester as an experiment in reforestation. Over the following six decades, it grew into one of the world's largest seedling nurseries, producing millions of pine seedlings a year for planting across the state's denuded north. The nursery proved the concept, but it needed labor on a massive scale to translate seedlings into actual forest.
The Civilian Conservation Corps arrived at Higgins Lake in December of nineteen thirty-three. The CCC was one of Franklin Roosevelt's most popular New Deal programs, enrolling unemployed young men in conservation work in exchange for wages, meals, and housing. At Higgins Lake and camps across northern Michigan, CCC crews planted trees by the millions and fought forest fires that had become chronic in the logging-scarred landscape. By the time the program ended in nineteen forty-two, more than one hundred thousand Michigan men had enrolled, and they had planted four hundred eighty-four million trees across the state. That figure was more than twice the output of any other state in the program.
Just north of the state park, on former nursery land, Michigan maintains the Civilian Conservation Corps Museum in a replica CCC barracks, documenting the work of those nine years. North Higgins Lake State Park itself sits on the nursery grounds, a park built on the site of the enterprise that planted the forests now visible all around it.
