The Lumber Era and the Lost Cutler House
Near Grand Haven, Michigan
When the fur trade faded, white pine made Grand Haven rich. The first sawmill went up in eighteen thirty-five, and for the next half century logs came floating down the Grand to the mills clustered here at the mouth, then left by schooner for the building yards of Chicago. In the peak year of eighteen seventy-three, local mills cut around one hundred twenty-five million board feet of lumber.
One of the barons of that age was Dwight Cutler, a Massachusetts man who arrived in eighteen fifty, built the Cutler and Savidge Lumber Company, employed hundreds of men, and served several terms as mayor. In eighteen seventy-two Cutler opened a hotel that stunned the region. The Cutler House rose five stories, in the elaborate Second Empire style, with steam heat, a steam elevator, hot and cold running water, and indoor bathrooms, luxuries the town had before it even had electric light.
It was the grandest hotel in west Michigan. Then, around one in the morning on the first of October, eighteen eighty-nine, fire broke out in an adjoining meat market. A southwest wind drove the flames, and by dawn the Cutler House, Cutler's own mansion, a church, and some thirty buildings were gone.
It was the most destructive fire in the town's history, and the great hotel never rose again.
