Perry Hannah and the Lumber Boom

Traverse City exists because of one man and one thing, and the thing was white pine. The man was Perry Hannah, and locals still call him the Father of Traverse City. He was born in Pennsylvania in eighteen twenty-four, drifted west to Chicago, and by eighteen fifty-one he and his partners had bought a small sawmill at the mouth of the Boardman River, right where it empties into Grand Traverse Bay.

The company was called Hannah, Lay and Company, and over the next thirty-five years it cut something close to one billion board feet of lumber from the Boardman valley. Think about that number. Enough wood to build entire cities, and that is very nearly what it did.

When the Great Chicago Fire leveled that city in eighteen seventy-one, much of the timber that rebuilt it floated south out of Grand Traverse Bay. But Hannah did not just cut trees. He built the town around the mill.

By the eighteen fifties his company was the largest employer for a hundred miles, running the general store, the bank, the docks, and most of the jobs. Traverse City was, in every practical sense, a company town, and Hannah was the company. When the village was incorporated, he became its first president.

When Michigan granted it a full city charter on May the eighteenth, eighteen ninety-five, Perry Hannah automatically became its first mayor. He built himself a grand Queen Anne mansion on Sixth Street, all turrets and carved wood, and it still stands today as one of the finest surviving lumber-baron homes in the state. There is a harder truth folded into this story, though.

The pine that made Hannah rich was, within a single generation, almost entirely gone. The great forests of northern Michigan were cut so fast and so completely that by the early nineteen hundreds the lumber era was simply over. What saved Traverse City was not more timber.

It was fruit. On the cleared, sandy, lake-cooled hillsides left behind by the loggers, farmers planted cherry trees, and a lumber town quietly reinvented itself as the Cherry Capital of the World. Hannah died in nineteen oh four, wealthy and honored, having watched his town be born, boom, and begin to remake itself all in a single lifetime.