When the Pine Went Out

Before we get out of town, understand what this whole coast WAS, because it explains every place we'll pass today.

Michigan's white pine was the finest structural softwood on the continent — tall, straight, light, and it floated. Between about eighteen sixty and nineteen hundred, the loggers took nearly all of it. The scale is hard to hold in your head: Michigan cut more lumber in those decades than California produced in gold during the Gold Rush, and it built Chicago twice — once, and then again after the fire of eighteen seventy-one.

The method was seasonal and clever. Crews cut all winter and skidded the logs onto the frozen rivers. When the spring thaw came, the whole winter's cut went downstream at once in a churning mass, and rivermen rode it with peaveys, breaking the jams — a job that killed a great many of them. At the river mouth, a mill and a harbor town. At the dock, a schooner bound for Chicago.

And then it ended, almost overnight, because there was nothing left to cut. The mills closed, the schooners went to the breakers, and the towns either found something else or emptied out. What replaced it here was fruit, then tourists.

So every harbor town today, every straight stretch of road that used to be a rail spur — it's all the furniture left behind by an industry that finished a hundred years ago.