THE FARMING REGION ABOUT KALAMAZOO AND MANTON IS NOTED FOR CELERY The soil is a deep black muck and the plants grow in long, boarded-in rows. Tourists in the vicinity of Kalamazoo are familiar with the sight of great cartloads of celery being sold on the street corners (see, also, text, page 300). IN THE STORAGE BINS OF ONE OF THE SAGINAW SUGAR FACTORIES The beets are loaded into the bins from motor trucks and freight cars, and are conveyed to the slicers and cookers within the plant by water flowing swiftly through sluiceways. RAW MATERIAL FOR THE SATISFACTION OF AMERICA'S BIG SWEET TOOTH Michigan stands with Colorado in the front rank of States producing sugar beets. Her crop approximates a million tons annually, but this figure shrinks to little more than an eighth of its weight by the time the beets are reduced to refined sugar. IN FIVE MINUTES THIS PLANT CAN TURN OUT A MILE OF PAPER The Kalamazoo Valley is among the most extensive paper manufacturing centers of the world. This is one of its largest units and embodies the most advanced ideas in paper-making machinery (see, also, text, page 300). Photograph by Felix J. Koch PICKLES IN THE MAKING Near Onekama is one of the largest pickle districts in the world. for John Lansing, patriot and jurist, was established in 1848, the legislature found itself in a huge, barnlike structure whose timbers had been hewn in the surrounding forest wilderness. So few were the white settlers thereabout that Indians were enlisted to raise the liberty pole. But to-day is Michigan's manufacturing era. Her every city, it seems, must make something, and her very capital is not content to make only laws. Lansing has 15,000 hands engaged in industries, mainly the automotive or auxiliary thereto, producing an annual output valued at $185, 000,000. Though Lansing's forests have long since yielded to the spacious avenues radi ating from her lawnsurrounded Statehouse, and though the cry for reforesting the State is widespread, the capital and her sister cities rank among the country's most beautifully treeshaded communities. Sometimes appearing as if buried in greenery, and for the most part displaying regularly spaced maples along foliage-roofed streets, Michigan's towns thus preserve a souvenir of the great logging area of their State. Michigan's "forest primeval" lay with pine and softwoods mainly to the north of the 43d parallel of latitude, and with the hardwoods mainly to the south of it. A century ago her area was still 97 per cent timbered. WHEN THE LUMBER JACK WAS KING In the expansion period that followed the Civil War the State loomed up as the great pine producer. Eastern farmers turned pioneer and trekked Michiganward for their fractional investment in the 125,000,000,000 feet of timber that rose north of Saginaw. The Prairie States were calling for timber, and Michigan's was massed in big stands with easy river access to the Great Lakes. Up sprang 800 camps employing 25,000 loggers. Plank roads were laid through the wilderness. In 1875 there were 30 solid miles of logs in the Au Gres. For more than 30 years men chopped and saws screamed, until in 1890 Michigan's pine lumbering reached its peak with 4,250,000,000 feet. Few indeed are the survivors who can In these huge containers which line a central walk the pickles are set in brine, and as a given lot is desired an attendant with a net dips up the required quantity (see opposite page). spin tales of tremendous log drives down some spring-swollen river in the sixties. "Great days those," says one octogenarian, "with our drive of 1,400,000 feet of pine logs ready for the ice break-up, and the boss's wife-our cook and the only woman in camp-and the boys eating, drinking, fighting, swearing, and snoring-all in French-Canuck!" Few remember Silver Jack, the toughest, "swearingest" character in the drive. of eighty, and how he wouldn't have his mother's religion insulted by the college graduate who questioned the Savior's divinity, and how Jack fairly throttled him into acknowledging the same; whereupon the whiskey bottle was passed and the camp solemnly drank to Jack's mother's religion. GROWING PAINS ACCOMPANIED MICHIGAN'S EMERGENCE FROM HER FORESTS The lusty pageant of a State emerging from forests into farms is over. In 1924 Michigan's cut, taken chiefly in the Upper Peninsula, was under 800,000 feet, or less than 3 per cent of the national production. Yet above the Saginaw Valley the old logging days have set their ineffaceable mark, inasmuch as most of the towns in that region began as lumber camps and evolved out of that industry. But the young State's transition period from lumbering to manufacturing was not accomplished without growing pains. Her forests shorn, a host of lumber townsLudington, Cheboygan, Bay City, Manistee, Alpena, Muskegon, Saginaw-relapsed temporarily into stagnation or ruin. The story of Muskegon, sometime the "Lumber Queen" of the west coast, is typical. Her glories fled, her people trekked, and grass grew in her streets. Then slowly she rebuilt herself on the deserts left by vanished sawmills. How the woodworking, automotive, and other industries have lifted the once-ruined town to her present prosperity is one of the most striking stories in Michigan annals. Saginaw, once such a "Sawmill City" that her shore area was materially enlarged by filling in the shallow lagoons with incalculable tons of sawdust, represents a similar rise, fall, and comeback. To-day she actually pays more in freight bills on her automotive and other products than her famed lumber cut was worth 40 years ago. |