The Lumber Baron and His Grandson

There is a direct line from the white pine forests of Michigan to the automobiles that built the American middle class, and that line runs through one family in Flint.

Henry Howland Crapo arrived in Flint in eighteen fifty-eight, already in his fifties, already a successful businessman from Massachusetts. He looked at the Flint River, looked at the enormous stands of white pine surrounding the city, and built the largest individually-owned lumber operation in the state. His timing was perfect. The nation was industrializing. Wood was essential. Within a few years, Crapo was rich enough to run for governor of Michigan, and he won, serving during and after the Civil War.

When the timber ran out, as it always does, the money stayed. And the money stayed in the family.

Henry Crapo's grandson was named William Crapo Durant. Billy Durant grew up in Flint carrying his grandfather's middle name like a badge. He started in insurance and real estate, quick and charming, with a gambler's instinct for opportunity. In eighteen eighty-six, he and a business partner named Josiah Dallas Dort bought out a struggling two-wheeled road cart business in Flint for fifteen hundred dollars. Durant had never built a wagon before in his life.

Within fifteen years, the Durant-Dort Carriage Company was the largest volume producer of horse-drawn vehicles in the United States. They employed one thousand workers and produced fifty-six thousand vehicles in their peak year of nineteen oh six. The wealth of the lumber era had seeded the carriage era.

And the carriage era would seed something far larger. When Billy Durant looked at the new automobile and saw what his grandfather had seen in the white pines, he moved fast. The same instinct, two generations later, pointed toward the future that was coming.

The lumber camps are gone. The pine forests were cleared a century ago. But the capital they generated is still echoing through Flint.