Lumbering

Summary

Beaver Island was cut over. What the industry cut was not the white pine that made Michigan’s lumbering reputation but the northern hardwood forest that covered almost the whole island: beech, sugar maple and hemlock. That distinction shapes everything about the local trade. Hardwood is heavy, burns well and rafts badly, so the island’s timber went first as steamboat fuel (from the 1840s), then as hemlock tanbark, and only later as sawn lumber under an industrial operation — the Beaver Island Lumber Company — with a mill at Saint James and a narrow-gauge railway running up the west side to the camps. Its departure date is disputed: sources held here give 1915, 1916 and 1917.

The baseline

The Michigan Land Cover Circa 1800 layer reconstructs pre-settlement vegetation from the original General Land Office surveyors’ section-line notes. Within the archipelago bounding box it maps 189.2 km², distributed as follows (computed in EPSG:3078, Michigan GeoRef, metres):

Beech–sugar maple–hemlock accounts for 140.69 of 189.2 km² — about 74% of everything mapped. Pine accounts for 0.68 km², roughly a third of one percent. That is the single most important fact about lumbering here: there was essentially no pine to cut. The island could not participate in the Michigan pine boom, and its timber industry took the shapes it did because hardwood and hemlock were what it had.

Two cautions on the figure. The layer is a reconstruction interpolated from surveyors’ notes, not an observation, and its polygon boundaries are far more precise than the data underneath them. And the bounding box covers the whole archipelago, not Beaver Island alone — Beaver Island is 150.96 km² of it.

Strang’s 1854 description of the mainland pineries makes the contrast himself: of the Little Traverse country he writes that its timber, while valuable, “is not so abundant, as to tempt lumbermen to make lumber for export.” His account of Beaver Island mentions timber only as fuel and as an obstacle to farming.

Phase one: fuel, 1840s–1860s

Before coal, Great Lakes steamers burned wood, and Beaver Island’s harbour put it in the right place to sell it. Quaife records that when the Saints arrived, “The land could be cleared for nothing, since there was a steady demand for cordwood, which could be sold at fifty cents a cord.” Clearing and selling were the same operation.

By 1854 Strang could report at Saint James: “There is one sawmill. Three large wharves are devoted to the wood business.” The village of Galilee at the south-east end existed for the wood trade alone. The Daily Northern Islander’s market column in 1856 quotes seasoned beech and maple steamboat wood at $1.75 to $2.00 near the wharves, down from $2.25, with sales at Galilee “more than 50 cords a day”. A single advertiser offered 3,000 cords of “best body wood, beech and maple”.

The trade outlived the kingdom. A traveller’s letter reprinted in the Bismarck Tribune in 1873 asks how the post-Strangite islanders subsist and gets the answer: “Mostly by fishing, and cutting and selling cord-wood.” A pile on the dock is worth $3 a cord.

Sawn lumber, by contrast, was scarce even locally. The same 1856 paper reports “The supply of boards, plank and scantling is next to none” against the demand of buildings already projected.

Phase two: hemlock tanbark

Hemlock bark yields tannin, and the tanneries of the lower lakes bought it by the cord. The Northern Islander carried a standing advertisement:

WANTED. [quantity] CORDS of Hemlock Bark, delivered soon, for which the highest price will be paid. MARCENA THAYER. Saint James, July 8th, 1852.

The advertisement runs across many issues, and the OCR garbles the quantity differently every time it appears (the date reads 1852 most consistently); the figure should be read off the page images before it is cited. What is not in doubt is that the trade was new: an editorial notice in the same paper announces hemlock tanbark as a “NEW ARTICLE OF TRADE”, “to be shipped to Racine”. It is worth noting what tanbark cutting implies: bark is peeled from standing or freshly felled hemlock in spring, and the trunk is often left. Tanbark cutting removes hemlock from the forest without producing lumber.

Phase three: the Beaver Island Lumber Company

The industrial phase is best documented by an outsider. The Rock Island Argus of 12 April 1912 describes the village:

The village contains a lighthouse, an antiquated life-saving station, and one saw-mill owned by a lumber company which is cutting timber at the head of the island and bringing it down to the mill by means of a narrow gauge railway which extends from the mill along the west side of the island to the camps.

That is a full industrial operation: mill at the harbour, rail haul, camps at the cutting face. Community sources name the operator as the Beaver Island Lumber Company and one dates its departure to 1917; a vessel chronology published in the modern Northern Islander records the schooner Nellie Johnson carrying “two miles of rails to Beaver Island Lumber Company’s narrow-gauge railroad” in 1903, which would place the railway’s construction at about that date.

That 1917 departure date rests on a single source — a 2026 community-newspaper article — and is the weakest-sourced of the three end dates on record for the company. A University of Notre Dame student research project gives 1915 instead, citing the primary works of Gladish (1976) and Case (1938); a chronology attributed in project research notes to the Clarke Historical Library also reports 1915, with the company organised 1902-12-27 and operational 1903-06-19, though this project has not independently located or verified that chronology and reports it here as a lead, not a confirmed citation. A third source, the Beaver Island Lodge’s historical timeline (which also gives 1901, not 1902-03, for the company’s start), gives 1916, citing The Elders Speak by George Anthony. Two of the three end dates are academic or archival rather than a community newspaper, and are consequently the stronger-sourced claims even though end_date here still records 1917. That field has deliberately not been changed to 1915 or 1916 — this is a recorded disagreement, not a resolved one. See Open questions.

The same March 2026 account records a village called Peshawbestown established on Beaver Island below Angeline’s Bluff in 1905, “where many Native residents worked for the Beaver Island Lumber Company, until its departure in 1917” — evidence that the industry was a significant Anishinaabe employer, but not evidence that 1917 is the settled end date. See Anishinaabe presence in the archipelago.

Logging was not confined to Beaver Island. A large operation ran on High Island until 1908. Welke’s 2026 account dates the House of David’s Israelite Colony there to 1912-1932, but a 1967 local retrospective gives a c.1906-1930 chronology and a 1963 report places a House of David employee on High Island in 1936. The colony’s exact operating span remains contested. Garden Island still has an abandoned sawmill and standing structures.

The railway also has a source-qualified casualty record. A 1969 museum report says a memorial plaque was being prepared for the site where David Chase lost his life on Good Friday in 1907; a September 1960 report had already described the same location as marked by a white-painted cross. Neither account names the train or operator, gives the exact site, or establishes whether anyone else died. The event is therefore linked to the island’s lumbering context without being assigned to the Beaver Island Lumber Company.

What the forest looks like now

The 1912 Argus describes the aftermath directly, and it is a description of a cut-over forest regrowing:

The trees are small, varying in size from one to fifteen inches in diameter. A two-foot tree is unusual and the entire woods have that civilized look … From 20 to 30 different species of trees grow there. Side by side the cedar, elm, spruce, maple, beech, pine, hemlock, balm, white brier and oak twine and intertwine, while underneath grows no underbrush.

A century later the 2023 Master Plan records forest as the dominant land cover again — upland forest at roughly 55% of Beaver Island and lowland forest at another 23% in LTBB’s 2010 detailed land-use mapping — with about a third of the island in state ownership under the DNR Wildlife Division. Active management continues: the Beaver Island Wildlife Club reports funding 65 acres of aspen regeneration. The forest came back. Its composition and structure are not the 1800 forest, and nothing held here measures the difference.

Open questions

• Production figures. No board-feet, cordage or bark tonnage series for the island has been located for any phase. Michigan state forestry reports and Corps of Engineers lake-commerce returns are the obvious places to look.
• Who owned the Beaver Island Lumber Company, and where did it go? Nothing held here gives the corporate history.
• The company’s end date is disputed, and end_date (1917) is the weakest-sourced of the three candidates. 1917 comes from a single 2026 community-newspaper article (Bobbi Welke). A Notre Dame student research project citing Gladish (1976) and Case (1938) gives 1915, as does a chronology attributed to the Clarke Historical Library — company organised 1902-12-27, operational 1903-06-19, ceased 1915 — that this project has not independently verified. The Beaver Island Lodge’s historical timeline gives 1916, citing The Elders Speak (George Anthony), and also puts the company’s start in 1901 rather than 1902-03. end_date has deliberately not been changed, to keep the disagreement visible rather than pick a winner; a future editor with direct access to Gladish 1976 or Case 1938 could resolve it.
• The narrow-gauge railway’s route and fate. The 1912 Argus places it along the west side from the mill to the camps; the 1903 rail delivery gives a probable build date. Its alignment is not mapped in any dataset here, and the project records “railroads: genuinely none” for the modern island — which is true now and was not true in 1912. A trace may survive in the trail network or in aerial imagery.
• The 1907 train wreck. The two later Beaver Beacon reports identify the memorial and David Chase but do not provide a contemporary accident report, exact location, railway operator, or complete casualty list.
• How much was actually cut? The 1800 baseline is on disk and a modern land cover layer exists, but no change analysis has been run, and the two are not directly comparable (one is a reconstruction from survey notes).
• The tanbark trade’s extent and end. One advertiser and one trade notice in 1852 are the whole record here.
• GLO plats and patents would date and locate the cutting parcel by parcel. They are the project’s largest outstanding retrieval gap.

See also

• Beaver Island
• High Island
• Garden Island
• Shipping and navigation
• Commercial fishing
• Demography
• Anishinaabe presence in the archipelago
• James Jesse Strang
• Death of David Chase in a Beaver Island train wreck (1907)