Salt From the Ashes of the Sawmills
Near Ludington, Michigan
Ludington was built on white pine, but when the great timber ran low, the mills found a clever second act underground. Beneath this whole region lie beds of salt, laid down by an ancient sea, reachable by drilling down to brine that could be pumped up and boiled dry. Boiling brine takes enormous heat, and the sawmills already had it.
They were burning through mountains of scrap wood, sawdust, and waste steam that would otherwise go to nothing. So salt and lumber grew up as partners. The mill's refuse fired the evaporators, and salt and lumber companies ran both trades under one roof.
By the eighteen nineties the Manistee and Ludington area had become one of Michigan's leading salt producing regions. It was a shrewd way to squeeze value from what the loggers left behind. As the forests thinned and the mills closed, the salt business faded too, and the companies consolidated.
Long after the pine was gone, salt kept Ludington's smokestacks working a little while longer. The town sits at the mouth of the Pere Marquette River on Lake Michigan. It was first called Pere Marquette before taking the name of lumberman James Ludington, and it became a city in eighteen seventy-three.
A railroad began carrying cargo across the lake by boat in eighteen seventy-five, and by the middle of the nineteen fifties Ludington was the largest car ferry port in the world.
