Karen Hartwick holds her son Robert (1907). People like Karen Hartwick, who saved Hartwick Pines. Today, the trees have grown tall, and you can still spot them, in stretches of forest where pine trees grow in perfect rows.Īnd a few people acted to save the forests that still stood. The civilian conservation corps went acre by acre, planting millions of trees. Eventually a massive effort began to replant the trees. That’s because a hundred years ago, after the forests were destroyed, the soil washed out, the remains sent up in apocalyptic flames, the people of Michigan had a change of mind. “So we have a much simpler and younger forest on average,” Nadelhofer says. Younger forests have less diversity of plants and animals. Most of us can’t tell the difference, but there is a difference. Pretty much all the forests we see in northern Michigan are like that. “But it’s really sort of a early-middle-age forest in terms of forest life cycles.” “You know when visitors go up there, they think it’s a beautiful, pristine place,” Nadelhoffer says. But it’s really sort of a early-middle-age forest in terms of forest life cycles.” “You know when visitors go up there, they think it’s a beautiful, pristine place. It sits on about a hundred acres of land along Douglas Lake on the northern tip of Lower Michigan. He directs the University of Michigan biological station. “This was a regionwide, human - I don’t want to call it a disaster - but a major disturbance,” says Knute Nadelhoffer, a biologist who studies forest ecology. But the land of Michigan is still recovering. The worst of these fires ended over a century ago. It killed more than 280 people and sent a plume of smoke all the way to the East Coast. Ten years later, in 1881, the Thumb Fire burned another million acres. An estimated 2.5 million acres across Michigan burned. It’s known today as the Peshtigo Fire, and it’s still the deadliest wildfire in U.S. One fire started in eastern Wisconsin and reached parts of Michigan's Upper Peninsula. Most of us have heard of that day because it’s the day Chicago burned. On Octothe Great Lakes states were consumed with fire. They left behind the smaller trees, the gnarled branches, the pine needles - just enough to set off massive wildfires.Ī photo dated from 1938 shows a wildfire in the Huron-Manistee National Forests. They show barren landscapes, strewn with branches, tinted in sepia. There’d be tree stumps with their roots exposed because erosion was a big problem. If you wanted to go on a road trip from Grand Rapids to Mackinac City, it was ugly, looked like a wasteland. And we don’t necessarily think of the Michigan of a hundred years ago that - it was ugly. “Because a lot of us think about Michigan having these beautiful, big forests. “It’s not something a lot of us think about,” she says. Hillary Pine says the result on the land was devastating. Michigan is the state that put the world on wheels. When Ford split from that company, Murphy stayed in the automobile business, and renamed the company Cadillac. When Henry Ford launched his first car company in Detroit, the money came from William H. So did his grandson, William Durant, the founder of General Motors. In 1858, a man named Henry Crapo moved from Boston to Flint to get into the lumber business. Today, there’s only one place in Lower Michigan where you can see a forest like that.Īfter building his fortune in the logging industry, Henry Crapo would go on to serve as Michigan governor from 1865 to 1869. White pines and hemlocks, with massive trunks that shot straight to the sky, branching only at the very top, 100 feet above ground. American chestnuts are nearly extinct now, most of them killed off by blight. American chestnuts too - giants that once spread across the eastern U.S. In the southern half of Michigan, maple, beech, oak, hickory, and ash. They tell of a land covered by ancient forests. All we have are the words and maps left by the Europeans and their descendents. There are no pictures of Michigan before the trees fell. I’ve been trying to hold a picture in my mind of what de Toqueville must have seen. "The noise of civilization and of industry will break the silence of Saginaw." "In a few years these impenetrable forests will have fallen," he writes. When he finally emerges onto the banks of the Saginaw River, he contemplates what was soon coming for this land. He relies on native guides to find the way. An 1850 portrait of Alexis de Tocqueville, painted by French artist Theodore Chasseriau.Īlexis de Toqueville travels on horseback from Detroit to Saginaw, the entire way covered by dense, virgin forests and swampland.
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