White Pine and Clear-Cuts, Michigan's Lumber Century

Stand anywhere in Michigan's Lower Peninsula today and look at the forest. What you see, almost everywhere, is a second-growth forest, young trees, even-aged stands, a landscape still recovering from one of the most thorough deforestations in American history. In the four decades between roughly eighteen fifty and eighteen ninety, Michigan's great white-pine forests were cut down almost entirely.

The white pine of Michigan was extraordinary timber. Straight-grained, light enough to float, durable in construction, it grew in stands across hundreds of miles of the northern Lower Peninsula and the Upper Peninsula, trees a hundred and fifty feet tall and four feet across at the base, packed so densely that surveyors of the eighteen thirties described the forest floor in perpetual shadow at noon. By the eighteen fifties, the forests of New England and New York were mostly exhausted.

The nation's construction appetite turned west. The Saginaw Valley became the center of the trade first, then Muskegon, then the whole northern Lower Peninsula from Traverse City to Alpena. At its peak in eighteen eighty-eight, Michigan mills cut over five and a half billion board feet of lumber in a single year, a volume that dwarfed anything produced anywhere else in the world.

The city of Saginaw alone contained over thirty sawmills. Rivers throughout the Lower Peninsula were jammed bank to bank with floating logs every spring, driven downstream to the mills by gangs of river pigs, the loggers who worked the drives with pike poles and caulked boots. The mill towns exploded into wealth.

Then the timber ran out. Saginaw, Muskegon, Bay City, cities that had roared with machinery and money, went quiet with startling speed. What was left behind was logged-over land that nobody wanted, pocked with stumps, subject to catastrophic fires fueled by the slash the loggers had left behind.

The Thumb region of Michigan burned in eighteen seventy-one and again in eighteen eighty-one; thousands of people lost farms and homes. The state eventually replanted much of the cutover land. Today Michigan has more trees than it did in nineteen hundred.

But the original white-pine forest, the one the Anishinaabe hunted beneath and the French paddled through, is gone. A few fragments of old-growth survive, the most notable in Hartwick Pines State Park, near Grayling, where fifty acres of original timber stand as a monument to what once covered millions.