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11 Stanley Yuill Sam Titus conducted this interview with Stanley Yuill in 1975. Stanley Yuill: We didn’t ›oat anything on the rivers; they were used for pine. Our main business was hardwood. We sawed in our mill in Logan, brought hemlock in on our railroad [from] that big [logging] out‹t east of Gaylord. We shipped the hardwood down to Bay City. Sam Titus: It got on a boat down there? A: They manufactured it. Hardwood lumber for ›ooring. My folks came here originally to farm, and they farmed a lot of timber. We had our ‹rst automobile here in 1910. Q: What kind? A: Cadillac. They shipped it up from Bay City, on a boat to Cheboygan. It took them all day to come down this road where the sand—you know, they got stuck. A good many people had their ‹rst ride in that car. . . . The ‹rst year we took a trip back to Ontario—go down through Port Huron and up that way [into Canada]. But gee, it took us three days to go. Q: No wonder, there were no roads. A: I know it. It was all down through the jack pines, the sandy roads. No markers. You stayed where you left off. They didn’t have any maps. They kind of made signs that people put up. Q: Now getting to animals, birds, and wild›owers and that sort of thing. How much was here that you can remember? 142 A: Just outside of town a ways there was all kinds of forest and the wild berries were around most every place. Never went far before you got blackberries, and we still get them. I one time got the urge back in, I forget what date it was, we started to—30 acres of raspberries, gosh, as a crop we couldn’t sell them. Q: Now you get 90 cents a quart for them. A: I guess so. Q: Now if you had 30 acres of red raspberries you’d be a millionaire. A: Yeah, I guess if we would have held onto all our land we would have been millionaires ten times over. But that’s gone; we sold it for nothing, give it away, lots of it. Q: Can’t worry about it now. A: No, I didn’t make it so I don’t care, nothing to me. My father was pretty well off when I come along. Q: Did he hunt? A: He never hunted a day in his life. He owned thousands of acres of land to hunt on, but people from Detroit come up and they never asked permission to hunt. They did everything, burned everything up. There were quite a few different people out here once. They logged hardwood and made broom handles. I think originally somebody had a stave mill, they made out of elm. Q: Were there a lot of shingle mills? A: We had one in town. And then Kellys had the little mill in the Pigeon. They made little mills someplace near where they were getting the timber . Q: And whenever one of these little mills sprung up there would be a little community. A: Yeah, a little settlement. They’d have a blacksmith and a cook. Our camps were all larger as we got around. Q: How many did you have altogether before you quit? A: We had four, I think. Q: Going at once? A: Yeah. See, we had two railroads, one that come out from Wolverine and another one at Logan. We had four locomotives. Stanley Yuill 143 Q: Whatever happened to all that stuff? A: We sold it when we got through with it. Sold the rails. Q: And took them up. That’s where the roadbeds are now. A: You’ll see where railroad beds have been all over the country. Q: How big was Vanderbilt as a town when you . . . A: About the same size. Mostly pretty good class of people. They bought out east of Gaylord where we lumbered, we sold them the land. I know a fella down there to Roscommon, he, I forget what his name was, he brought them in by the trainload from Chicago. And sold them farms out there they couldn’t raise anything on, and they would get out there and they just about starved to death. They would move back, ‹nd some other job. Boy, I tell you it was bad. Q: Was this your family home? A: No...

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