(uplifting music) [Announcer] - This program was made possible in part by the Willard N. Thomson Senior Charitable Trust, husband, father, grandfather, church elder and World War Two veteran.

Mr. Thompson is deeply missed by all who knew him.

[Commentator] - Local Productions on Q-TV are made possible with support from viewers like You.

Thanks You!

(chainsaw revs) [Eric] - Logging is a job that requires strength and stamina.

Today, there are few companies that continue the lumbering tradition.

(chainsaw roars) During the late 1800s, over 27,000 men and boys worked in Michigan's lumber camps and saw mills.

They harvested virgin white pine that sometimes measured up to seven feet in diameter and reached as tall as 200 feet high.

These trees were turned into the lumber that helped build this country, and brought millions of dollars, and thousands of people, to the state.

Hello, I'm Eric Jylha.

Since white pine covered a good two-thirds of Michigan's lower peninsula, most people thought the lumber industry would last forever.

Well, they were mistaken.

What took hundreds of years to grow was brought to the ground in less than 50.

From the end of the Civil War to the beginning of the 20th century, white pine was king in Michigan and Lumber Barons and Shanty Boys ruled the Saginaw Valley.

♪Come all you jolly shanty Boys ♪ ♪that work the shany and go ♪ ♪ Come listen to my story ♪ ♪ and I will tell to you ♪ ♪ Our trials and our hardships ♪ ♪ we undergo each day ♪ ♪ While working up in Turner's camp ♪ ♪ along the Chippewa ♪ [Narrator] - In a few years, these impenetrable forests will have fallen, the sons of civilization and industry will break the silence of the Saginaw.

We are perhaps the last travelers to see the primitive forest grandeur.

[Eric] - It was the French statesman and author, Alexis de Tocqueville, who while touring Michigan, recognized the importance of the timber found here.

He predicted the trees would bring civilization to the Saginaw Valley.

De Tocqueville was right.

Soon investors and laborers were flocking to Michigan to make money from timber.

What he couldn't predict though, was the impact that the lumber industry would have on Michigan and the Saginaw Valley.

Michigan's largest resource was in huge demand, and that in turn, attracted settlers to the Saginaw Valley.

[Jeremy Kilar] - Initially, the pioneer settlers who came into the valley saw all the trees as obstacles.

They were primarily interested in the fur trade, fishing and farming.

And only as time passed, and they gravitated into the farming did they realize that they could make some profits on the side by cutting the pine trees and selling them to nearby settlers.

And as we moved out of the Saginaw Valley where the soil was poor, we discovered that the pine trees brought more wealth from the land than farming did.

So initially, trees were not seen as such as a valuable resource, but gradually became more and more valuable by the time of the early 1840s, 1850s, prior to the Civil War.

[Eric] - When the East Coast lumbermen ran out of wood in New York, they sent prospectors into Michigan to look for more.

These men were called timber cruisers.

They surveyed the state, and reported back to the investors there was white pine for as far as the eye could see.

There would be enough to keep the saw mills in operation for years to come.

[Jeremy] - Pine was the basic building block in America prior to the Civil War.

At that time, of course, it was used for building houses, log cabin construction.

It was soft, it was pliable, it was knot-free.

And it was very, very light.

In Michigan, we had some tremendous stands of pine.

There was a stand of pine reputedly in Gladwin County running along the Tittabawassee river for about 80 miles, where the trees stood 175 feet tall.

And you could get a board 40 feet long, 12 inches wide with absolutely no knots in it at all.

So this certainly impressed the lumberjacks who had come from the East Coast.

And very quickly they began to send their timber cruisers out here to find land in which they would, of course, cut the valuable pine.

[Eric] - Purchasing agents came to the region to buy tracts of land from the federal government.

They paid as little as $1.25 an acre, and bought plots 40 acres at a time.

Henry Sage was one of the first businessmen to start buying up the land here.

By 1865, Sage and his partner John McGraw, moved their sawmill operation from New York to Bay City.

[Ron Bloomfield] - Prior to 1864, most of the sawmills were owned by small local businessmen, and they employed probably less than 100 people.

When Sage and McGraw came on the scene, everything exploded.

And they very quickly employed more than 300 people in the mill.

Then they built a town, the infrastructure, and everything to go along with it.

[Eric] - Other businessmen soon followed.

They bought their own property and built their own sawmills.

Michigan's timber was in demand all over the country, and the world.

[Jeremy]- Essentially, you can look at two distribution areas, the Lake Michigan area and the Lake Huron area for Michigan pine.

A good year to remember is 1871, when the Chicago fire occurred, and most of the lumber along the Muskegeon River, the west side of the state, heads towards Chicago.

And actually it's Michigan pine that rebuilt Chicago after the Great Fire in 1871.

After that, much of it is shipped by rail out west, where it ends up being not necessarily for house building, because they're building sod houses, but for railroad ties, they're using it for fence posts, and then sort of tertiarily for home building.

On the eastern side, of course, out of the Saginaw Valley Region, Saginaw and Bay City shipped their lumber southward.

Much of it goes to Detroit, Toledo, which connected with Cincinnati by the Ohio Canal, and the bulk of it goes to Tonawanda and Buffalo, because that's the mouth of the Erie Canal, where it's then taken by the Erie Canal to Albany, which is a larger lumber trading center.

And from Albany it goes down the Hudson River, of course, to New York.

So the east side of the state goes east, along the canal system and the Great Lakes, and the west side goes principally directly to Chicago.

[Don Comtois] - Men who loaded these boats were called dockwallopers.

The term came from the sound made when planks and logs and square timbers were dropped onto a boat.

Thus creating a wallop sound.

These men received from 40 to 45 cents per hour for loading these boats.

In 1883, there were shipped out of Bay City over 552 million feet of lumber.

This does not take into account the square timber, lathe, shingle and other wood products.

[Eric] - Word quickly spread about the quality of Michigan's timber.

Industries began demanding that only white pine lumber be used in their products.

At its peak, the lumber industry was a three billion dollar industry.

In today's dollars, that business would be worth $57 trillion.

[Jeremy]- Probably the most obvious impact of logging and lumbering along the Saginaw River is the growth of the cities.

West Bay City and Bay City, and East Saginaw and Saginaw City had a population of approximately 1,500 and 3,000 in the 1860 census.

By 1884, both cities were close to 40,000 people.

Initially we had sort of traditional, white, Anglo-Saxon Protestant settlers coming into the Saginaw Valley, but with the advent of logging and lumbering, we began to have a lot of immigrants coming in, especially after the 1870s.

We began to have a number of southeast Europeans and people from the Scandinavian countries, who were settling to work in the lumbering and logging business.

[Eric] - The Saginaw Valley waterways made it easy to transport logs from the woods.

The Tittabawassee, Chippewa, Shiawassee and the Cass Rivers all connect to the Saginaw River, and then out to Lake Huron's Saginaw Bay.

This port area made it easy for the timber to be shipped back east.

[Jeremy]- River traffic increased tremendously because of the demand for logs and lumber.

And not only was it important, of course, as a source of hauling logs from the interior, but the river also became important because it was the distribution center for sending cut lumber to points along the Lake Huron and Lake Erie shoreline.

[Eric] - Shortly after the Civil War, the future of the Saginaw Valley looked promising.

Many predicted lumbering would go on for many years.

What they didn't know was that several factors would shorten the life of Michigan's white pine era.

[Narrator] - There seems to be little romance attached to it, and the man as either an employer or workman, seeks the woods and looks for anything but sentiment.

It's the saw logs he's after.

[Eric] - From Bay City to Clare, lumber camps were set up every four miles or so along the rivers.

Eight of those camps were owned by Wright and Ketchum out of Saginaw.

They employed over 500 men.

Sage-McGraw was the area's largest employer.

They had 20 camps and over 1,600 men.

The size of the operations varied from small camps of 25 men, to larger camps of 100 workers.

It was in these camps that loggers, known as shanty boys, became folk heroes.

Every October, they'd ride the train from the city out to the woods.

Some would have to walk another 10 miles to their camp before they started their jobs.

Men and boys, some as young as 14, worked six days a week harvesting timber for a wage of just a dollar a day.

And, these hearty men didn't get paid until the end of the season.

[Ron] - A good source of information on life in a lumber camp came from a guy named John W. Fitzmorris, who was a journalist from Saginaw, and actually spent four years in the woods with the lumberjacks while he was selling subscriptions for the Bay City Hospital.

So he recorded all of the daily goings on in the lumber camps.

And then about four years later, he wrote a book called The Shanty Boy, or as a subtitle, Life in a Lumber Camp.

They were called shanty boys because the term lumberjack was not commonly used until the 1890s.

[Eric] - Cutting down trees was hard work, and these men had a well earned reputation for being tough.

Each man had a job and got paid based on his skill.

Those who cut down trees were called fellers, and most of them, in the early years, used axes.

[Jeremy] - A team of axmen would take to cut down a 16 inch in diameter tree probably around 15 or 20 minutes.

By the late 1850s, early 1860s, they began to adapt the crosscut saw to cutting down trees.

And actually, you would have two teams here, the undercutters, who would cut a notch in the tree, planning the direction in which the tree would fall.

And they would be followed by a group of fellers, or tree fallers, who in turn would cut from the opposite direction, and the tree would fall according to where the notch was placed.

A 24 inch tree could be cut down by both teams probably between 15 and 20 mins.

[Mike Slasinski] - In the early days of logging, a wide, flared type of ax was used.

But they were rather unwieldy, and very cumbersome.

Then, an improvement was made, called the Yankee ax, which was a single-bladed ax with a heavy pole.

This counterbalanced the blade, so they could swing and it wouldn't be so hard on their arms.

Another improvement was made even later on in logging, a double bladed ax.

This allowed them to have twice as much cutting surface, so they could, didn't have to sharpen the blades as often.

Well then finally, around the Civil War, an improvement was made to the crosscut saw, adding what we call raker teeth.

This allowed the saw to remove the chips that the cutting teeth cut.

This was a great improvement over earlier saws, which simply had cutting teeth.

Adding the raker tooth allowed them to cut trees down much more rapidly, and it was physically less demanding on the feller.

[Eric] - Once the trees were felled, the trimmers, or swampers, moved in to trim them up for moving.

Logs were then hauled to the river by men known as skidders.

And these men used either horses or oxen to facilitate transport.

The logging sled was one of the most important tools in the woods.

It was used to move loads of logs to the river's edge.

An ice trail was made for the sled's skis, and the horses walked on the inside of the tracks to pull the sleigh.

Some woodsmen made it a point to see just how big they could get their load.

The trick was getting the logs stacked just right.

[Gary Skory] - It took a lot of skill for the top loaders to do their jobs.

These men had to be fast, strong and very, very skilled to make sure that when those logs came up the skids, they could dance out of the way without being crushed.

[Eric] - Men working as scalers measured the size of the log to estimate how many board feet one tree would produce.

Then the stamp-maker marked the log ends so that each log could be identified and would end up at the right mill later.

[Mike] - A log scaler was a person employed by the lumber company to measure and tell how many board foot of lumber could be expected to get out of a given log.

This was done by taking a log scale and measuring across the butt end of a log, and by knowing the length of the log, you could tell how many board foot of lumber you could expect to get out of that given log, allowing for waste.

A board foot is a one foot square by one inch thick piece of wood.

This is a traditional measurement for wood that's been since the early days of logging.

(soothing guitar music) [Eric] - Each camp had a cook who fed the men three, or sometimes four, meals a day.

Breakfast was usually pancakes with blackstrap syrup, coffee and tea.

Many times, dinner was a meal of pork and beans.

But there was always good bread, biscuits, pies and gingerbread.

Because of the physical demands of the job, the men in the camps always had plenty to eat.

[Gary] - There weren't a lot of strong benefits to working in a lumber camp, but the shanty boys did have great quantities and qualities of food to eat.

They would eat their food in silence for the most part, because there were so many nationalities, up to four or five in any one camp.

The owners didn't want the men to break out in fights or have frayed tempers and cause problems.

[Eric] - Some of the woodsmen were local farmers trying to earn extra money during the winter months.

But shanty boys came from all over the world to work in the Michigan lumber camps.

The melting pot of workers included folks from Polish, German, Swedish and French-Canadian backgrounds.

They were generally good hearted, but there always seemed to be at least one man in camp who was ready for a fight.

[Gary] - Life in the lumber camps was anything but pleasant.

There was always somebody out to show that he was stronger and more vicious than anybody else, and so the pecking order of lumberjacks or shanty boys became a well-known fact of fights and brawls.

Now, when these guys would come back to their camps, their life was anything but easy.

They all worked in very difficult circumstances.

They came back to a bunk house that was rough and tumble in its own right.

Most of them slept with bedbugs and lice.

They had a very difficult time.

When they hit the sheets at night, I'm sure that they were very, very tired.

[Eric] - On Saturday nights, men would play musical instruments to entertain their camp mates.

It was a time to let loose, but not too loose.

Drinking and playing cards was not allowed in the camp.

Many fellows spent Sunday, their only day off, cleaning and mending their clothes.

Some passed the time making wooden gifts for their families.

[Mike] - The shanty boys themselves were rather creative.

And one of the things they did on Sundays was to carve things for their children and for their wives.

Most of the shanty boys were farmers that were supplementing their incomes in the wintertime.

So this allowed them to bring some gifts home to their families.

Some of the things that they carved were little people, whistles, tools, animals.

And another thing that they did was carved cedar fans, made by taking a piece of cedar, and carving an outside shape to it, and then making very thin slats, and then fanning the slats out behind each other.

And you could make fans, you could make birds, fish, and things like that.

[Eric] - These hearty men cut and chopped their way through the Michigan woods.

Most of the property had been purchased in 40 acre parcels.

But, there wasn't an exact way to tell where the 40 acres began and where it ended.

Sometimes they found themselves cutting trees on property that didn't even belong to their employer.

[Gary] - Early on in Michigan's lumber industry, it was not uncommon for lumbermen to take every advantage they could for their industry.

They would buy 40 acre parcels from the government, but the surveyed lines were not so distinct and clear.

So to compensate for that, the lumbermen would log off their 40 acres they purchased, and all the additional 40 acre parcels around them.

So in reality, a lumberman bought 40 acres, and could log off hundreds and get away with it.

[Narrator] - Men congregate here in an atmosphere thick with tobacco smoke to guzzle beer and whiskey, listen to vile jokes, and to watch brazen women as they leer and smirk and kick up their heels in the can-can.

[Eric] - Two things happened in the spring.

The logs came down the river, and the men came out of the woods.

Remember, the men get paid at the end of the logging season.

Saginaw and Bay City were bustling communities, and they were ready for the men to come to town and spend their money.

Between the drinking, and the gambling and the prostitution, it didn't take long for the shanty boys to become poor boys.

Two of the most popular destinations for the woodsmen were the White Row district, along Water Street in Saginaw, and the Catacombs district, at Third and Water streets in Bay City.

[Jeremy] - After six or seven months in the camps, the one thing that they wanted to do on their return, with approximately 150, $180 in their back pockets was to go on a bender.

So up in the north they would buy what they called a ticket to hell, get on a railroad train, drive into Bay City and Saginaw.

And prior to getting a job in the summer working in the sawmills, or returning to the farms, what they would do is visit the saloons, the brothels and the gambling palaces in Bay City and Saginaw.

So it tended to be a fairly wild month, especially in April and May in the 1870s and 80s and early 90s.

[Tom Powers] - What people don't realize is that Saginaw and Bay City were much more dangerous towns than what we think of as the outlaw towns in the West, like Dodge, Kansas or Tombstone, Arizona.

The murder rate during the lumbering era in Midland or Saginaw, Bay City was two, three, four times the rate that of Dodge or Tombstone.

[Eric] - In 1878, there were 138 saloons in East Saginaw and 66 bars on the city's west side.

And, according to the 1880 census, the city also had 32 brothels.

[Jeremy] - I think the main reason that prostitution was tolerated throughout the lumber era is because it brought so many shanty boys into town, and with them, it brought so much money.

In the case of Muskegon, for example, they taxed their brothels and saloons $10 a month.

This generally brought in enough money to pay for the entire police force for one year in that city.

So thus there weren't really that many efforts to rid these towns of that vice.

[Eric] - Many brothels could be found in Bay City's Water Street, running from Third to Center.

It was called Hell's Half Mile, called that because of the temptations it offered.

Drinking, gambling, and prostitution.

[Jeremy] - The ticket to hell was the infamous ticket that the shanty boys would purchase in the interior prior to getting on the railroad trains to come into town.

In the 1870s and 1880s, you would go to a railway stop and buy a ticket, get on a rickety old train.

The conductor, after he punched your ticket, would often come down the aisle way with a case full of pint bottles, and he would sell these for exorbitant sums.

If you hadn't tasted liquor for six or seven months, you wanted a bottle no matter what it cost.

And for two or three hours, you rode down to Bay City.

By the time you got to Bay City, you had ridden on a train without springs, you had sat on wooden seats for two or three hours, and the first thing you wanted to do was simply roam down to Third Street and Water Street, Hell's Half Mile, and visit the brothels and the saloons.

And these benders would often go on for a week, until they had spent a good part of their winter earnings.

[Ron] - One of the most notorious areas of Hell's Half Mile had to be the Catacombs.

Which was the name of an actual saloon, but this myth evolved about it being this underground city.

And it was located at the corner of Third and Water Streets.

It's where the St. Laurent Brothers building is nowadays.

And what it probably was was a series of pole and freight tunnels that ran from the river into the local businesses.

And they were just used, because they were out of the way and away from the public.

[Eric] - During the peak of the lumber era, Bay City had over 180 bars on both sides of the river.

Too much liquor often led to swinging fists among the shanty boys.

Tim McCoy was a police chief during the 1880s in Saginaw.

While recounting the logging days in a 1932 newspaper interview, he said, "A policeman had to be a real man and a good scrapper.

"Anytime you wanted a fight, the lumberjacks "Would be glad to accommodate you."

Silver Jack Driscoll was reported to be one of the toughest men to come out of the woods.

This legendary lumberman stood six foot four inches, and 200 pounds by the age of 16.

Whenever he stepped into a saloon, there was at least one man willing to take him on.

[Tom] - Silver Jack Driscoll was a moderately good lumberjack in the woods, but his real talent was fighting.

And when he fought, it was thought quite proper to gouge somebody's eye out, chew off an ear, bite a nose, and when you knocked him down, step on him with your spiked boots, and leave little black imprints all over their face.

He was one of the best fighters, if not the best fighter, to be found in the north woods from Saginaw to Duluth.

[Eric] - There was a legendary fight between Silver Jack Driscoll and Joe Fournier, another lumberman who really had people talking.

Fournier drank just as hard as he worked, and was a tough customer like Driscoll.

So it was inevitable that the two would come together for a fateful fight at the Red Keg Saloon in Averill, north of Midland.

[Tom] - Joe Fournier was a talented lumberjack, but he surpassed himself when he went to town and got drunk.

He was one terrible, fearsome brawler, who people just hated to cross paths with.

One of the reasons was because he had a skull that was reputedly as thick as a boilerplate, and he had a double row of teeth, both top and bottom.

Well, he would walk into a bar, and if he'd never been there before, he would walk up to the bar, lean over, and literally bite a chunk out of the bar, split the splinters out and say, "There, that Joe Fournier, he leave his mark."

Joe and Silver Jack had beaten numerous opponents in the spring in the early 1870s.

More by happenstance than by design, the two happened to both go into the Red Keg Saloon in Averill, Michigan on the Tittabawassee River, probably during the spring dry.

There were no verbal sallies, no dares, no lines drawn in the sawdust.

When they saw each other, tables and chairs, and lumberjacks were thrown to the edges of the saloon.

And the two guys went at it.

Driscoll may have won the fight, but that's not what was really important.

The significance of the fight was that it solidified both men's reputations.

But after this fight, their names really went down in history in Michigan, especially in folklore.

It just established them as preeminently the two most important lumberjacks in the era.

Two authors claim that Joe Fournier was their model for Paul Bunyan.

Also, if you were a man, and you were interested in fighting, this was like the Ali-Frazier fight, and you were there, and you didn't even know it was gonna take place.

Also, if you were there, it meant that you had free drinks for the rest of your life, because anytime you told any bar that you were there when the fight took place, free rounds would come for as long as you talked, and there was whiskey to pour.

[Announcer] - as soon as the rivers thawed in the spring, loggers broke the timber from the rollway and tumbled it into the rapidly moving river.

River hogs rode the logs downstream.

They kept the river free of jams and obstructions, but many a life or limb was lost in the spring.

[Eric] - Not every logger took the train to town to drink away their winter paycheck.

Some stayed behind to work the spring log drives.

They sorted logs and brought them down the river to be rafted and delivered to the mills.

It was a tough job, some say harder than working in the woods.

But the Saginaw Valley rivers made transporting the logs easier than in most other areas of the country.

Author Herbert Nolan said at the time, "The Saginaw and Tittabawassee rivers "Were the greatest log driving rivers in the world."

[Gary] - Without a doubt, the rivers of the Saginaw Valley were some of the finest in the state, and perhaps the nation, for logging.

The Tittabawassee, the Saginaw and others, they were wide rivers that were deep, and they handled those millions of logs every spring that the lumbermen need to make sure their mills operate.

[Eric] - Logs would be transported to the river's edge and dumped along the banks until spring.

One well-known place to hold the timber was the Averill banking grounds just north of Midland.

Several lumber companies used this site to hold their saw logs.

[Kevin] - During the boom of the lumbering era, the Averill roll bank, or Red Keg roll bank as it was known was in fact the largest roll bank in the world.

There were more logs put down the Red Keg roll bank than anywhere else in the world.

One of the reasons it was so, such an important roll bank was it was one of the few spots on the river that had a significant height variation, which allowed them to store their logs, and then in the spring, when the floods came, they could roll the logs down this high bank into the river on the way to Saginaw for marking and milling.

[Eric] - The ends of the logs were marked with a stamp to show which company owned them.

Despite having these company marks, some logs were still stolen and remarked.

[Mike] - This was not a practice that was as prevalent as people might think.

But there were some unscrupulous people that would cut an inch or so off the end of the log and remark it with their company's mark or their own mark, and then float it back down to the mill.

The problem was that if these people were apprehended, they were dealt with very harshly.

[Eric] - Even with these end marks, it was tough to sort the vast amount of logs in the river.

Charles Merrill saw an opportunity in this problem.

He started the Tittabawassee Boom Company in 1855 to help lumbermen get their logs to the mills.

Lumber owners were also shareholders in the company, and his log sorting business provided an essential service.

Here at the Hoyt Library in Saginaw, these books are records of the Tittabawassee Boom Company.

They give us a good idea of how many logs went down the river back then.

And according to these records, there were 1,100 log marks registered with the state at one time.

[Jeremy] - The log marks were put on the ends of the logs by the lumber barons, and the lumberjacks of course to sort the logs and bring some order to the confusion of who owned the logs that were floating down the river systems into the Saginaw River.

You have to imagine that there are millions of board feet of logs coming down.

And at one time, there were 160 sawmills along the Saginaw River.

Very difficult to determine whose log goes to what sawmill.

To accomplish some sort of order here, the boom companies were created.

And the boom companies essentially are pens that were located along the Saginaw River.

There were about 500 men employed, working in front of large pens to pull the logs according to the log mark that was on them into the pen behind them.

At the end of the day, they would have these logs rafted by tugboats down to the sawmills, where they had been commissioned to be cut into boards.

The Tittabawassee boom employed, and it was the largest employer in Saginaw in the 1880s, 500 men.

And the Tittabawassee boom ran for about six or seven months.

Many of these men, of course, often kept the saloons and brothels going during the summer months, when the lumberjacks were no longer around.

[Eric] - Men called river hogs would ride the timbers downstream, and they wore caulk boots.

These boots had small spikes know as caulks on their soles to help them keep their balance.

They used tools called pike poles and peaveys to guide the floating trunks away from the banks and bridges as they rode along.

[Eric] - It truly must have been a phenomenal sight to look at these rivers in the 1880s in the springtime, and see millions of logs floating down the stream toward the mills.

That was a phenomenal sight, but it was also a very, very dangerous job.

River hogs were the people who were made sure that these logs kept floating without problems.

It was a very dangerous job and they knew it.

River hogs were paid an average of four or $5 a week more in bonus pay because their job was so dangerous.

[Eric] - Log jams proved troublesome for the river hog.

High water levels and too many logs often blocked the flow of river water.

In 1869, a Tittabawassee Boom Company foreman named James Whittier reported 110 miles of logs laying in a solid jam in the Tittabawassee River.

[Kevin] - The river hogs were people that were charged with breaking up these tremendous logjams.

They had the most dangerous job on the river.

Their fatality rate was very high, and when they couldn't find the key log to break the jams, they would dynamite the jams apart.

Again, to get those logs down to Saginaw, before the rivers receded and were unnavigable for logging.

[Eric] - Once the jams were cleared, the logs were sent downstream to another staging area where they were rafted.

[Mike] - Companies such as the Tittabawassee Boom Company were hired by the logging companies to sort the logs by their brand that were floated down the river.

The logs were pulled over into pens alongside the river, until were enough logs were gathered to make up a raft.

The rafts were fastened together, and then they were floated, continued floating up the river to the lumber mills that were commissioned by the logging company to cut that particular company's logs into lumber.

[Eric] - The wood rafting pin was one of the key inventions to come out of the need not only for efficiency but also safety.

[Mike] - One clever individual came up with the idea of making a pin that looked a lot like a clothespin.

It could be driven right over the top of a manila rope.

These pins were made out of a hardwood, and they would still be extracted by being knocked out.

But if it broke off, it would not cause a problem with the saw blade.

Metal rafting pins were used, but they did have some shortcomings.

If the pin was dropped into the river, of course it sunk.

If the pin were, when it was being extracted, if it broke off, and a small piece was left in the log, it could cause a problem with the saw blade.

[Eric] - Once the logs were rafted or boomed, they were towed to the mills by tug boats.

[Don] - There were three rafting firms in Bay City, Reed Wrecking and Towing Company, Michigan Log Towing, and the biggest, the Saginaw Bay Towing Association, operated by Smith and Boutell.

At one time, they owned 17 tugs, consisting of both harbor and lake.

In July of 1889, the tug Peter Smith towed a raft of 3,500,000 feet of logs.

They were so large that they would not even fit into the mouth of the Saginaw River.

The ships coming into the river and leaving the river would have to wait till these rafts got out of the way.

Which really caused quite a bottleneck.

[Narrator] - Necessity is said to be the mother of invention, and nowhere is this more evident than in the lumber towns.

[Eric] - It was technology that had the biggest impact on the harvest of the prized lumber.

New inventions made getting the wood out of the forest faster and more efficient.

It increased the amount of wood harvested and decreased the lifespan of the industry.

[Mike] - Technology was an ongoing occurrence with the loggers.

Some of the things, like the improvements on saws, axes, various tools that they invented on the spot to allow them to get the job done.

[Eric] - During the early years, woodsmen relied on sleighs to haul the logs to the river.

But these could only be used when the temperatures dipped below freezing and a frozen track could be formed.

The first big wheel was manufactured by Silas Overpack in his wagon shop in 1870.

Because the big wheel didn't need a frozen track to run on, it became a very popular method to haul logs out of the woods.

- This wheel consisted of a pair of wagon type of wheels made out of wood with a metal rim, an axle between them, and a tongue.

The tongue could be lifted up in the air, and then a chain hung down from the axle.

It would be fastened around a log, and by lowering the tongue, and then harnessing it to a pair of horses or oxen, the log could be dragged out, because a lot of the log was off the ground.

This actually extended the logging period because all the logging was primarily done in the wintertime prior to this invention.

[Eric] - The invention of the narrow gauge railroad was another breakthrough for the industry.

Light weight tracks were laid to where the men were harvesting the timber.

A small engine and rail cars were then used to haul out the logs.

[Forrest] - With the introduction of the logging, narrow gauge logging railroad, things changed forever.

The railroads were able to go out into all of the hinterland and bring logs from there more rapidly than what they would if they'd used simply the horse and sleigh, and driving them down the water.

So they would run out on cheap rails, on cheap rail ties, and then the camps would load their logs on these railroads, and they'd haul them to the river or wherever they would be hauling them to.

And it was very dependable.

[Eric] - The tracks usually ended at the river bank.

It was here that the logs were pushed off the cars and into the river where they would wait for the next part of their journey.

The railroad industry was slow to make tracks into the lumber business.

Some of the local lumbermen saw the railroad companies as competition.

They were concerned too because sparks from the tracks could cause fires and destroy the trees.

[Forrest] - The impact of the railroad when it came into Michigan in 1876 had a tremendous and immediate impact.

It took a lot of men a lot of muscle power.

But it was dependable, and that was the main thing.

[Mike] - Large equipment like the logging locomotive and methods of hauling the logs out of the woods were all things that led to shortening the actual era of logging.

[Narrator] - in 1884 over 130 sawmills scattered along the river.

The once clean river was brown and ugly, clogged with runoff, bark, splintered logs and broken boards.

[Eric] - Many of the woodsmen, who didn't work the drives or return to the farm in the spring ended up working in the mills.

Between Saginaw and Bay City, along the river, there were 130 lumber mills.

And they were located along the river for several reasons.

The river was used to transport the logs to the mill, it provided a staging area for the logs that were waiting to be cut, and it was a cost effective way to distribute the milled lumber, by ship.

The site of Saginaw's first saw mill was at the end of Mackinaw Street.

Harvey Williams, or Uncle Harvey as he was known, used a steam engine from a boat to power the saw.

John Larkin was one of the few owners to operate a sawmill in an area upstream on the Tittabawassee River.

His mill was the second largest operation in the valley.

The biggest mills were located downriver in Bay City and Saginaw.

During the Saginaw Valley lumber boom, the two Sage-McGraw Mills in Bay City were the largest sawmills in the world.

[Ron] - A sawmill was not a friendly place to work.

They resembled large industrial factories.

And there were no OSHA standards, so the workers were exposed to all kinds of health risks, including loud noise, smoke from the different machinery, sawdust all over the place.

And a typical workday was 12 hour shifts, six days a week, and during the height of the lumbering era, some mills operated 24 hours a day.

[Eric] - Sawmill buildings were usually two story operations.

Equipment needed to run the blades was located on the first floor, and the saws were on the second.

The gang saw revolutionized the saw mill productivity.

Built by the Wickes Brothers of Saginaw and first used in the Sage-McGraw mill, it cut logs into several boards with just one pass.

[Mike] - The gang saw was a vast improvement over the circular saw.

This was a steam-powered saw, multi-bladed saw, where the blades could actually be set up for a given width, so you could cut the best width of boards out of a given log.

A log would be loaded on a carriage, and run through this gang saw in one pass.

Very much of an improvement over a circular saw, where the log had to be run back and forth through the blade.

[Don] - Wickes Brothers of Saginaw manufactured a gang saw that contained 24 blades that moved up and down like a saber saw.

This saw could cut a log three foot in diameter with one pass.

With a gang saw, a mill could consume a vast amount of logs in a short time.

[Eric] - It was said you could tell a man who worked in the saw mill because he usually was missing a finger.

Workers also lost limbs, and even their lives, to the equipment.

Oftentimes, men would fall into the saws or a metal dog would catch and shatter a blade.

Breathing problems from the brine wells, which were also operated at the mills, was a serious health concern too.

[Ron] - Mill owners didn't provide health benefits to their workers.

If you were injured, you were responsible to seek out and pay for your own medical care.

And you were lucky to have a job if you came back, because there was always another person looking for a job who could replace you.

So mill owners didn't feel the need to take care of their employees' health needs.

[Sandy] - The threat of fires was quite common in sawmills, in part because the buildings themselves were made of wood.

Most of the structures around the sawmills were often made of wood.

The streets were made of wood.

Not to mention the fact that there was a lot of sawdust laying around.

Dry sawdust, the saws themselves produced a lot of friction.

That friction could easily ignite a spark that could set these sawmills on fire quite quickly.

That's why in a lot of historic images you'll see barrels along the ridge line, the top ridge line of many of the sawmills.

And that was to have water up there in the event that a fire actually happened, they would hope that they could get up there, tip those barrels of water over.

If they couldn't at least save the mill, they would hope that it wouldn't spread to the other parts of the sawmill's structure compound, as well as spread to the cities.

[Eric] - A fire at the Sample and Camp sawmill on Ojibway Island sparked the great Saginaw Fire of 1893.

When it was over, 23 square blocks of the city had been destroyed.

[Sandy] - There was an abandoned sawmill on Ojibway Island, and there was a lot of old sawdust piles laying around.

What is believed is that a passing tug threw a spark that quickly caught the sawmill on fire.

It was a very windy day, and the fire quickly spread to the main part of Saginaw.

In four and a half hours, it ruined over 250 homes and businesses throughout the city.

[Gary] - In May of 1892, Midlanders suffered one of the worst tragedies of the lumber era in Midland.

That tragedy was the explosion of the Midland Salt and Lumber Company, the town's largest employer.

Not only did the explosion claim three lives, it also essentially wiped out the remnants of the lumber industry in Midland.

[Narrator] - The sawmill workers are part of their machines.

they could not even stop for a drink of water but must keep up the labor just as the inanimate machinery.

The men are cogs in a vast machine.

[Eric] - Mills operated six days a week, running two 12 hour shifts every day.

Working from six o'clock to six o'clock, an employee's only break was for lunch.

Child labor was not uncommon in the mills, with kids as young as 12 working to sweep the mill floors.

They made about 50 cents a day, at a time when adults didn't quite make two dollars a day.

[Don] - Women did not work per se in the sawmills.

But in the mills producing lathe and shingles.

Their pay ranged from 75 cents to a dollar per day.

The Hargrave Mill, located on the middle grounds in Bay City, employed 32 young ladies.

Some operated the saws, while others packed shingles.

[Eric] - Besides milling lumber, salt was also mined by the mills.

A substantial amount of brine water was located in the Saginaw Basin, and turning the brine into salt was easy.

Scrap lumber was used to boil away brackish water, leaving a salt residue in large kettles.

The salt was then packed in barrels and shipped all over the world.

[Ron] - Mill operators found salt was cheap to produce, and the mill owners found that it was very profitable, for very little money put into it.

H.W.

Sage, in the 1870s, found that he was making, for very little investment, he was making between $25,000 and $30,000 per year using items that he normally would have thrown away, like sawdust and slag lumber.

[Eric] - Shanty Boys, rivers hog and sawmill workers had dangerous jobs with little pay.

In 1874, four nuns came to Saginaw with the mission of starting a hospital.

They raised money from the lumber barons to buy a building and supplies.

The Daughters of Charity of St. Mary's Hospital of East Saginaw opened its doors in 1875.

With a donation of $1,500, they were able to renovate a building, buy furniture and supplies.

[Sandy] - It was an interesting story how the Daughters of Charity actually came to Saginaw.

A local newspaperman by the name of John Fitzmorris actually had visited many of the lumber camps as well as the sawmills, and he saw the injuries that these men were sustaining, it was a very dangerous occupation.

He also saw that they weren't getting adequate healthcare, if at all any kind of healthcare.

And so he began writing in his newspaper and putting pressure on the local businessmen to establish a hospital in Saginaw.

Those businessmen in turn wrote to the Daughters of Charity, who came to Saginaw and established one of the first subscription hospitals in the area.

[Eric] - The first form of health insurance was sold to woodsmen and mill workers.

They bought a script for five dollars, and that entitled the worker to healthcare at St. Mary's Hospital for an entire year.

Workers tried to improve their wages and hours by organizing.

Their first effort came in 1872 at the Sage sawmill.

But, when the mill workers walked off the job, they were fired and replaced with Polish immigrants.

By 1885, lumber prices fell, so the mill owners cut workers' wages.

On July 6, 1885, the mills went silent when workers in Bay City walked off the job.

Their counterparts in Saginaw soon followed.

The mill workers demanded that their hours be reduced from 12 to 10 each day.

Their slogan, 10 Hours or no sawdust.

[Ron] - The strike caused financial problems for workers, many of whom lived paycheck to paycheck.

Not having a paycheck for a few months can be financially devastating on a family that's just trying to make it.

However, workers realized that they could stand up to their bosses, and they could fight for a better working environment.

[Eric] - By August that year, the striking workers were running out of money.

They knew the mills would close for the season by October.

If they continued their strike, they'd have to head back into the woods and spend the winter cutting trees.

With the prospect of no paycheck until the following April, they soon relented and went back to work.

Their demand for a 10 hour workday was never met by the mill owners.

[Narrator] - They were a thieving crew, addicted to mutton chop whiskers and piling up vast sums of money.

Time, however, had given them the status of empire builders, and their larceny is remembered by only a few diligent historians who do not count.

[Eric] - Many of the lumber barons who came to the Saginaw Valley were already wealthy.

Henry Sage made his mark logging timber in New York before moving his operation to Bay City.

He continued to live on the East Coast and never moved to Michigan, but he did visit Bay City occasionally.

[Ron] - At one time, half the lumber mills in Bay City were owned by absentee owners.

Thus, they had to have good, trusted management to run the mills.

Many times setting up their own sons as managers.

They helped determine the economic, the social, and the cultural climate of Bay City for many years.

But they're often criticized by locals for not keeping more of the wealth in Bay City.

And this is probably because they felt no responsibility to the local community.

Because they were not from here, and they didn't plan on staying here.

[Eric] - Henry Sage owned a mill in Bay City, which at one time was the biggest sawmill in the world.

He set out to surround that property with a company town.

The village he built was called Wenona, and it had family homes, boarding houses and company stores.

Sage's legacy was the building of Bay City's first library.

But his philanthropic gesture was questioned at the time.

Many thought that because of the money he'd made in the Saginaw Valley, he should have been more generous.

[Jeremy] - He started to build the library in 1881, and it was finished in 1884.

Approximately the costs were somewhere between $22,000 and $40,000.

During the construction stages, Sage decided that he would put in a reading room for the local citizens, although he began to take 25 cents out of his workers' wages every two weeks.

Today, that would be the equivalent of two hours of wages subtracted for that library construction.

[Eric] - Most of the mills were located downriver in Bay City and Saginaw and that's were the money went.

Midland didn't garner the same financial benefits from the lumber industry.

Most of the lumber barons lived in Saginaw or Bay City near their mills, or didn't live in the area at all.

[Gary] - By the late 1890s, most Midlanders realized that Midland County had received the very short end of a very large stick.

All that wealth in the lumber industry went by Midland on its rivers down to Saginaw and Bay City.

Midland County had the natural resources of timber and water, but we did not have the wealth that came from it.

[Eric] - There were many other businessmen who were able to join in the Saginaw Valley's good fortunes.

The Morley brothers, for example, made their mark by providing goods not only for the shanty boys, but also for their camps.

[Mark] - My great-great-grandfather, Edward Morley, and his brother George, came to Saginaw in 1863, and started into the hardware business.

And since most of Saginaw's business was revolved around the lumber industry of the time, the majority of their business was supplying the lumber industry with the dry goods and tools needed.

They provided the camp hooks, the peaveys, the saws, the axes, shovels.

And in addition, they provided the clothing, shoes, lumber, nails, stoves, and everything else needed to supply the lumber camps throughout the winter.

[Eric] - In 1881, the Morley brothers built the second largest hardware and dry-goods store in the nation.

They continued to provide a service to Saginaw long after the lumbering years faded away.

[Mark] - After the lumber industry moved west, Morley's continued to supply all of the businesses and startup industries in Saginaw with all of their hardware, industrial supplies, and also home furnishings in a lot of areas for the general public too.

So it continued to be a booming business in the area, and the company still continues today.

[Eric] - Other entrepreneurs developed businesses that could either use the waste wood from the saw mills, or the hardwood that remained after all the white pine had been harvested.

[Jeremy] - As time passed, the sawmill owners began to diversify into other areas with the material that was left over from lumbering and logging.

Initially, a lot of the scrap lumber that was used was simply dumped into the river or burned.

In time, they began to manufacture from scrap lumber laths for plaster, picket fences, wooden boxes, crates, and eventually wooden bowls and utensils.

Another industry that was an important spinoff industry was barrel manufacturing.

Barrels were important because of the fishing industry, to pack fish in salt in barrels.

And also the salt itself that was produced as a byproduct in the sawmills.

Lastly, cedar shingles were an important lumber town product.

Cedar, of course, is a valuable commodity found in the pine forests.

[Kevin] - In the 1870s, my family came to the Midland area.

In the mid-1880s, they started into the lumber business.

They started by making barrels and buckets.

These were made from the stumps primarily that were left over from the lumbering era.

After the lumber business had moved out of the area, they left the land full of stumps.

The land needed to be cleared for farming.

Full of stumps again, and this was a way for them to use it commercially, as well as in the aid of clearing the land.

[Ron] - At the foot of 34th Street in Bay City, along the river, there was a company called Bousfield and Company.

And they were one of many local companies that manufactured woodenware.

At one time, they were considered the largest woodenware company in the world.

They produced washtubs and churns, and pails, wooden bowls and wooden utensils.

And these items were manufactured here in Bay City, and they were shipped all over the world.

[Narrator] - One can ride through the heart of the pine country and see miles of stumps.

The large operators have gone out of business or have shifted the scene of their operations to the forest of the southern states or the Pacific Northwest.

[Eric] - After 50 years of logging, the green forests that had put so much gold into the pockets were nearly gone.

What had once been so plentiful in Michigan was finally coming to an end.

[Jeremy] - The lumbering and logging industry declined in Michigan primarily because lumbering and logging was based on an exhaustible resource.

And once the trees are gone, of course the industry itself has to subsist on trees imported from someplace else, or it simply has to move on.

And it was customary of course in the 19th century, and it was a fact of life that once the trees were gone, the lumbermen would pack up their machinery and move further west.

They'd come from New York, Pennsylvania, moved onto Michigan, Wisconsin and Minnesota, and by the late 19th century, they were making the big move across the middle border states to the far west.

By 1900, out of the 130 mills along the Saginaw River, there were only 35 left in the Saginaw area.

[Eric] - By the mid 1880's, the lumber in the Saginaw Valley was pretty much exhausted.

In order to keep the mills in operation, timber was imported from the Upper Peninsula of Michigan and Canada.

And when Canada stopped its shipments in 1894, well that pretty much signaled the official end of the lumbering era.

[Jeremy] - It was characteristic of the lumber business, as many businesses in the 19th century, to simply move on when the resources were exhausted.

By 1885, when the trees in the Lower Peninsula were gone, many of the lumber barons began to move to other areas of the country.

Most of them moved westward to Wisconsin and Minnesota, and even by the late century, they were beginning to move to the far west, Oregon, Idaho and Washington.

It was a transient business in itself.

A lot of the robber barons simply had no commitment or community responsibility.

They were here to cut as much as they could as rapidly as they could and move on.

And even the workers anticipated that they would be transient, that they would be here for a period of time and then move on.

[Eric] - One by one the saw mills went silent.

They closed their doors, the workers lost their jobs.

And as they went out of business, many mills were consumed by fire.

Speculation was that the owners set their buildings ablaze as the lumbering business came to an end.

[Jeremy] - Well, arsons did occur in the sawmills.

They were not necessarily widespread.

But nonetheless, they were a convenient method of moving on in recordkeeping.

By the late 19th century, we begin to accuse some of the lumber barons of being robber barons.

And rather than expose their records, it was easier simply to burn them up.

In one short period of time of about three years, 13 mills along the Saginaw River burned.

And no doubt the lumber barons were burning these mills directly or indirectly and collecting the insurance.

In 1890, the insurance companies began to investigate and stop payment, and all of a sudden, the arsons ceased.

[Eric] - When the trees were all gone, the shanty boys went looking for new jobs in the Upper Peninsula, Minnesota and Wisconsin.

And, the lumber barons, well they headed west to Oregon and Washington to stake their claim on new stands of timber.

[Gary] - The lumbermen acquired their land cheaply, but they were after the standing timber on top.

They didn't care about the land themselves.

So once the lumber was gone, there was no problem for any of them to let the land revert back to the state for taxes.

Fortunately for us, that allowed for a very strong agricultural industry and a state park system to arise after a lot of work was done to make sure that stump land became viable land again.

[Eric] - Before the barren land could be used by the farmers, all the stumps had to be removed.

This was a long process that sometimes produced little or no crops off the land.

The state of Michigan had to find some new uses for the land.

Bay City and Saginaw were looking for some new industry so that they could survive.

Bay City was able to chart its their economic future by diversifying its industries.

[Ron] - When the lumber industry left, it created a huge economic void in Bay City.

By 1905, the city had already started filling that void.

That was the year that shipowner Harry J. Defoe started Defoe Boat and Motor Works, which turned into the Defoe Shipbuilding Company.

And a few years later, the Sovereign brothers started the Ready-Cut Homes Company, which became one of the biggest sellers of catalog homes in the US.

And we also saw growth in some of the industries like the industrial works, Bay City Shovels, and even looking forward into producing auto parts for the world market.

[Eric] - Eventually, Saginaw moved from sawmills to industrial machinery as they made the move to an economy based on the horseless carriage.

[Sandy] - The Jaycocks Steering Gear Company, founded by Jackson, Church and Wilcox was one of the first automotive parts supply companies in Saginaw.

They supplied steering gear parts to many of the major manufacturers that were building automobiles at that time.

One of them was Buick.

Buick eventually acquired the Jaycocks company, before it became incorporated into what is now General Motors.

[Eric] - Without such a strong dependence on lumber, Midland was able to avoid the problems faced by Bay City and Saginaw.

Midland's future was about to be carried forward by a new industry pumped from brine wells.

[Gary] - The late 1890s was a time of great change and difficulty for Midlanders.

The lumber industry had pretty much bottomed out.

And it was a time of people leaving their town to try to find opportunities elsewhere.

It's also a time when 24 year old Herbert Dow came to Midland to use the natural resources below the ground, not on top of it.

The 20th century and Dow Chemical Company brought a new prosperity to Midland that had never been here in the 1890s.

[Eric] - White pine is what brought settlers to the Saginaw Valley during the lumbering era, making these the the glory days certainly worth remembering.

[Jeremy] - Why we should remember the lumbering and logging heritage from the Saginaw valley is because while many of the lumber barons perhaps left, a good many stayed, and left us with an entrepreneurial spirit that carried over into the next era, and that was the automobile era.

The competition, the intense drive, the skilled and unskilled laborers, the capital that was available.

All set the stage for the possibility of the automobile industry.

And when you think about it, even though we're struggling today with the automobile industry, the automobile industry, as a spinoff of the lumber industry gave this area 100 years of prosperity.

And really, we can't regret that.

[Narrator] - A nation behaves well if it treats its natural resources as an asset which it must turn over to the next generation increased, not impaired in value.

[Eric] - Lumbermen and politicians learned a great deal back in the days when white pine was king.

Michigan's modern-day lumbermen take great pride in protecting our forest resources and take to heart the lessons learned decades ago.

[Denny] - We all see lumber, as a member of the Michigan Association of Timbermen, and our livelihood depends on a renewable resource, the forest and the logs.

And because of that, we're a self-policing organization.

We do select tree harvesting where necessary.

We try to stay away from waterways, to avoid erosion problems.

It's important to us that we always have a renewable resource.

'Cause that's our livelihood.

[Eric] - Michigan has taken action to prevent a boom and bust lumber industry from ever happening again.

Many red pines planted in the 1930's by the Civilian Conservation Corps are now mature.

The state has a plan this time to harvest this timber over the next two decades in order to avoid drastic consequences.

[Denny] - 100 years ago, most of Michigan was covered in white pine which is a softwood.

As compared to today, most of Michigan is covered in hardwoods.

The white pine or any kind of pine primarily needs to be reproduced with planting.

The hardwoods will regenerate on their own with proper forest management.

And with proper forest management, we'll have that renewable resource to use for years.

[Eric] - Michigan's land may have recovered from the logging boom, but the industry never did.

A trade that once employed 27,000 men has only about 10% of that number today.

The modern lumbermen learned a lot from the past, so they'll be able to keep the logging business as a part of Michigan's future.

But there will never again be a time where trees grew big, sawdust flew and shanty boys reigned in the Saginaw Valley.

♪ Come on you jolly shanty boys ♪ ♪ That worked the shanty and go ♪ ♪ Come listen to my story ♪ ♪ And I will tell to you ♪ ♪ Our trials and our hardships ♪ ♪ We undergo each day ♪ ♪ While working up in Turner's camp ♪ ♪ Along the Chippewa.

♪ ♪ I started up from Saginaw ♪ ♪ To go up the Chippewa ♪ ♪ I landed in a place called Clare ♪ ♪ About 11 o'clock that day ♪ ♪ The place, it being so stumpy, ♪ ♪ I thought I was next to Hell; ♪ ♪ So I jumped on board of old Sax's stage ♪ ♪ And I came to Isabelle ♪ ♪While laying around in Isabelle ♪ ♪ I thought I'd go to work ♪ ♪ Away up in the lumber camp ♪ ♪ Where there was no time to shirk.

♪ ♪ I started after dinner time ♪ ♪ To take a little tramp; ♪ ♪ I fetched up just at supper time ♪ ♪ To Charlie Turner's camp ♪ ♪ At three o'clock next morning ♪ ♪ The cook his horn did blow ♪