History of the Pere Marquette River

It was not until the white pine-logging boom that large numbers of white settlers were attracted to the area. In 1847, only a few farmers and traders had settled in the watershed. The first mill at Ludington was built in 1859. It was small and served primarily local needs. In 1869, however, a general movement in the manufacture of pine lumber began.

In 1870, it was estimated that the watershed contained over three billion board feet of virgin pine sawtimber. Hardwoods and other species were then of little consequence. Soon huge volumes of white pine logs were floating down the river to feed the hungry saws at Ludington. Starting with a capacity of only three of four million board feet per year, by 1880 the eight Ludington mills were producing a combined total of 10 million board feet. With water improvements, this increased to 15 million feet per year. The seemingly inexhaustible supply of pine eventually was gone.

From 1870 to 1896, 3 1/4 billion board feet of pine were driven down the river, cut into logs and shingled and shipped to markets throughout the Midwest. A large share of it was used to reconstruct Chicago after the disastrous fire of 1871. This volume of timber would, under present-day standards, provide enough lumber to build 312,000 three-bedroom houses — enough to house a new city with the population of Detroit.

With the pine gone, the lumber barons set their sights on the virgin forests farther west. Not all of the lumberjacks went west with them. Many of the Swedes, French, Poles, Danes, Dutch, Irish and English that had cleared the land now stayed to settle and farm it. Some logging of the hardwoods, hemlock and other species spurned by the pine loggers continued into the 1900s. However, it never approached the frenzy or volume of earlier pine days.