An item in the Ludington Record of June 10, 1886, stated that timber broker Charles H. Chick had warned that the quantity and quality of pine timber in Michigan were rapidly diminishing. This was several years before most lumbermen came to this realization. When they did, some scrambled to add hardwoods to their trade while others moved on to new lumbering areas in the South or the Pacific Northwest.
In “Sand, Sawdust and Saw Logs” (1955), Frances Caswell Hanna wrote, with the assistance of retired lumberman Charles E. Cartier, an interesting account of local hardwood lumbering:
“During the nineties hardwood lumbering became exceedingly important to Ludington. In the early days of the lumbering industry when logs were brought down rivers to the mills the hardwoods were bypassed because the logs would not float. When the pine forests within profitable reach of the rivers had been cut, it became necessary to bring the outlying timber to the mills by means of railroads. With rail transportation available, the magnificent maples and other deciduous trees of Mason County began to share the fate of the giant pines.
“The woodsman’s ax had felled many hardwoods in the making of farms. Great bobsled loads of beech and maple cordwood drawn by oxen or farm horses, drawn in to fuel the town’s heating stoves and ranges, were familiar sights on Ludington streets. There were still large acreages of these woods on the farms when the mill owners sought them as merchantable timber. With improved methods of felling the trees, the land was left in suitable condition for clearing and cropping. Fruit growing and general farming made a rapid growth during this period of hardwood marketing.
“Though all the mill owners in Ludington cut hardwood as well as pine during the closing years of the waning industry, Albert Vogel became the leading independent hardwood operator in the county. He owned five portable mills and large tracts of hardwoods in Mason County as well as in Wisconsin. He continued to maintain his home in Ludington where he had come in the late seventies and, during the years since, had been the local representative of the Valentine Blatz Brewing Company of Milwaukee. In 1898 he controlled the product of nearly half the hardwood land in Mason County. Other Ludington operators who logged hardwood in that year were W.C. Barbour, Antoine E. Cartier, Charles E. Cartier, Butters and Peters, Cartier and Rath, Ludington Woodenware Company, Cartier Enameling Company, and Danaher and Melendy. Rasmus Rasmussen was the outstanding dealer in hemlock. He dealt in ties, wood and bark, shipping his product in his two-masted schooner, the Abbie.”
On November 2, 1899, the following item appeared in the Mason County Record: “Last week J.S. Stearns purchased the entire remaining lumber interests of Albert Vogel in this section. The consideration is said to have been $20,000 for which Vogel conveyed his standing hardwood timber only, amounting to about 6,000,000 feet. Mr. Vogel will continue his residence in Ludington for the present, but will devote his time to his extensive Wisconsin interests.”
Vogel’s Wisconsin operations were centered on Upson, a mining town in Iron County. On November 20, 1902, the Ludington Record-Appeal quoted a long article from the American Lumberman concerning Vogel’s sale of 400,000 acres of standing hemlock, hardwood and cedar to the Foster-Latimer Lumber Company of Mellen, Ashland County, Wis., the principals of which were George E. Foster, a former Ludington resident, and Harry I. Latimer, brother of Frank N. Latimer of Ludington.
By the time Warren A. Cartier built his home at 409 E. Ludington Avenue in 1904-05, hardwoods had become so valuable, and fashionable, an article of manufacture that the house’s interior woodwork reportedly comprises seven different kinds of wood.
The photograph of some of Ludington’s lumber docks is a view west from the Washington Avenue bridge, circa 1900. At left a 3-masted schooner is moored at the Stearns salt block; visible beyond is the Stearns lumber dock (present site of Ludington Yacht Club). A two-masted schooner is moored on the opposite side of the bayou. The smokestack at right discharging copious smoke marks the Cartier sawmill.
