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    Manistee County
    Manistee County
    Manistee County
    Ebook189 pages1 hour

    Manistee County

    By Shannon McRae

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    Between 1860 and 1900, some say, Michigan lumber made more fortunes than California gold. Many of those fortunes were made in Manistee. Home to hardworking, self-made millionaires, Manistee also became a thriving cultural center, with elegant architecture, theatrical performances, and intellectual societies that debated the issues of the day. Steamers and schooners brought tourists across Lake Michigan to stroll the grand streets, relax on the beaches of Onekama's Portage Point Inn, or attend the latest play at the Ramsdell Theater. Manistee County also offered opportunities for America's newest immigrants. Drawn by the promise of land and economic opportunity, the new arrivals established communities in the city and surrounding townships. For some of these settlers, such as the Finns who founded Kaleva or the small religious community of Brethren, Manistee County held the promise of utopia. When the lumber era ended, Manistee County reinvented itself, replacing sawmills and lumberyards with salt wells, hydroelectric dams, and power plants. As it continued to draw tourists from across the lake and along newly built roads, Manistee County entered the modern age with a vibrant future to match its fascinating history.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherArcadia Publishing
    Release dateSep 18, 2012
    ISBN9781439633182
    Manistee County
    Author

    Shannon McRae

    Shannon McRae, a Michigan native and descendant of Manistee pioneers, is an assistant professor of English at the State University of New York at Fredonia who specializes in early-20th-century literature and history. Working closely with the Manistee County Historical Museum, several other local heritage centers, and many citizens of Manistee who generously offered their time and expertise, she has assembled the images they have provided in order to preserve their stories.

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      Book preview

      Manistee County - Shannon McRae

      process.

      INTRODUCTION

      The story of Manistee County is in most ways a typical American story. The county’s phenomenal growth, decline, and subsequent revival as an attractive tourist destination are local manifestations of larger forces that shaped American history between the mid-19th and early 20th centuries. But Manistee is also unique, with tales of its own that would take a dozen books to tell properly. This book of images aims only to offer an array of small windows into Manistee’s fascinating past.

      Several circumstances combined to cause Manistee’s emergence, along with the Great Lakes region, as a major economic and industrial power by the mid-19th century. As Americans began to migrate west in search of land and opportunity, they settled first in the new frontier east of the Mississippi and between the Ohio River and the Great Lakes that was then called the Northwest Territory. Upheavals in Europe and Canada caused mass immigration to the United States. For all who could muster the basic resources and endure the inevitable hardships, the vast pine forests of the northern territories offered opportunities for a better life.

      The American industrial revolution of the early 19th century set the stage for phenomenal economic and industrial expansion. When the Erie Canal opened in 1825, grain and lumber could finally be transported easily and cheaply through the lakes and the canal. Settlers from the east could conveniently travel west by riverboat and schooner. Those settlers needed supplies with which to build homes and towns. The white pine forests of northern Michigan served that purpose.

      Michigan’s population soon grew to the 60,000 free citizens required for application to statehood under the rules of the Northwest Ordinance, and thus it became a state in 1837. Abundant natural resources—miles of white pine forest and a long, branching river emptying into Lake Michigan—all ensured Manistee’s position as a vital node in this growing industrial network.

      The stage was set, the first actors quickly entered, and the play began. In the fall of 1840, around the time that the Government Land Office survey was nearly completed and the state was divided into the counties that exist today, two brothers from southern Michigan, John and Joseph Stronach, sailed a small boat up the Lake Michigan coast. They came to the mouth of the Manistee River, searching for some suitable place to build a mill. They found one, but frustrated by an intractable log jam, they returned home until spring. In mid-April, John Stronach, this time with his son Adam, chartered the schooner Thorton out of St. Joseph, Michigan, and returned to Manistee. They arrived on April 16, 1841, a time of year when, in northern Michigan, snow and ice often have not yet melted.

      No available record tells us what kind of men the Stronachs were. But they had the cash to hire a schooner, to buy machinery and supplies, and the wherewithal to make a life in the wilderness. Besides the occasional abandoned mission and local American Indians, mostly Ottawas, who by this time were probably too accustomed to sporadic encounters with missionaries and traders to find the presence of white people noteworthy, the Stronachs saw nothing familiar: few if any other white people, no buildings, no machines, no water supply but the river and the lakes, and certainly no towns. Nevertheless, they set up their mill, began logging, brought the rest of their family up the coast, and after several frustrations eventually established themselves on the Little Manistee River at what is now called Old Stronach.

      Other white settlers soon followed, apparently with minimal resistance from the Native communities, John Canfield among them. They bought land cheaply, or else simply set up operations on federal land. Then, immigrants began to arrive from Canada, England, Germany, Ireland, and Scandinavia, fleeing unbearable circumstances in their home countries and willing to work long hours under harsh conditions in exchange for steady wages and the promise of land and freedom from oppression. These men were hired by mill owners, or later, contractors who represented the owners, and thus began the transformation of the forests into a valuable commodity, and the making of Manistee.

      The facts regarding 19th-century labor history are not always pleasant. The American dream of enormous wealth and success was only realized by a few—typically those who, like the Filer family and the Canfields, had sufficient capital to begin with. Most struggled just to survive. Early immigrant groups such as the Irish that arrived America in the early 1800s often suffered a worse fate than the one they had left behind—working hard labor on the Erie Canal and the canals of New Orleans or in the Pennsylvania coal mines, or living by their wits in the slums of New York. Irish who arrived a decade or so later in the 1860s might, after forced conscription into the Civil War on both sides, find work building the Transcontinental Railroad. Those who came to Manistee, however, found genuine opportunity, and many thrived. For the most part, anybody who could tolerate the long hours and rough living conditions, who managed to save his initially meager wages, and who had the social wherewithal to form associations with other individuals that could assist their advancement enjoyed historically unprecedented social mobility.

      The iconic self-made man so fundamental to the American mythos existed as actual fact in Manistee—Louis Sands, T. J. Ramsdell, and Thomas Kenny, to name a few. Their homes, their buildings, and their indelible marks on the landscape itself stand even today as testament to their individual accomplishments. But success in any major endeavor requires community support as much as individual effort. Manistee’s newly burgeoning ethnic communities of German, Scandinavian, and Irish provided that support for each other, as evidenced by the multiple ethnic societies and churches that were established, built, and paid for by member subscription. Most of these beautiful monuments remain in use, lovingly preserved and tended by the descendants of the original builders.

      Manistee’s growing sense of itself as a civilized community after the Civil War is attested in histories written at the time. Citizens celebrated the arrival of the young lawyer T. J. Ramsdell, the man who would settle the many legal issues that had begun to arise in this frontier town. They established congregations, benevolent societies, and the banks and office buildings required to aid the rapidly growing region. By this time, women were an established presence, and they engaged themselves energetically—sometimes fervently—in the ethical debates of the time—particularly the highly controversial topics of temperance and suffrage.

      By 1869, Michigan was producing more logs than any other state. The development

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