A Walhalla in the Wasteland: Carl Ernest Schmidt and the Quest of One German American Businessman to Save Michigan’s Forests

The Michigan Historical Review 46:2 (Fall 2020): 1-30©2020 Central Michigan University. ISSN 0890-1686 All Rights Reserved A Walhalla in the Wasteland: Carl Ernest Schmidt and the Quest of One German American Businessman to Save Michigan’s Forests By Kristin Poling In the fall of 1904, Carl Ernest Schmidt, a German American businessman from Detroit, traveled north from the city along the coast of Lake Huron looking for land suitable for the creation of a private game preserve. A tip had sent him to Cedar Lake, just north of Oscoda, a once flourishing timber boomtown 200 miles from Detroit. What he found there was hardly promising, and not at all what he expected. The land was barren; the soil sandy. There was little timber or brush to shelter the game he wished to hunt. Instead of giving up on his hopes for a hunting lodge to which he could retreat from his city cares, Schmidt bought the land anyway. If he could not purchase a tract of Michigan forest, he resolved, then he would have to create one.1 He would plant his own forest. Schmidt’s resolution was not to be one of self-interest alone. On that first trip, drunk with the romanticism of their quest, Schmidt and his travel companions spotted and photographed a fleeing thief making off with a full sled of pilfered lumber. In later telling, this sighting set Schmidt on what his life-long friend and close companion Tobias Sigel branded a “moral conquest.”2 He would find out where the timber that had once covered the state had gone. He would fight against the thieving and senseless waste of Michigan’s once beautiful forests. That faceless thief, laying waste to the land through what Schmidt perceived to be disorderly and selfish use, became the symbol of all that he would array his efforts in reforestation and land reclamation in the coming years against. The following spring of 1905, Schmidt began his project to secure himself a forest retreat and simultaneously to reform Michigan’s relationship to its land. He began with both the construction of a sevenroom house and also the planting of an initial 6,000 poplars and pine trees 1 Log book 1, 19-35, Box 1, Carl Ernest Schmidt Papers, 1892-1935, Bentley Historical Library, University of Michigan [hereafter CES Papers]. 2 Log book 1, 4. 2 The Michigan Historical Review on his new land.3 In anticipation of the hunting and revelry to come, and in evocation of his Germanic roots, he named his future game reserve and tree farm Walhalla, after the mythological hall of heroes of Nordic tales. In the first few years, the land of the Walhalla estate served primarily as a retreat for family and friends, but over the next three decades, Schmidt’s relationship to the land would evolve. He used his land, straddling Iosco and Alcona counties, to experiment with land reclamation techniques, to launch his own career in forestry and conservation, as a retreat for local and national German American organizations, and to build a successful model farm that sent eggs, dairy, and prize animals all over the country and even the world. The Walhalla project was an unusual one, and Schmidt’s contemporaries struggled to characterize it. Schmidt’s endeavors on the land north of Oscoda brought together a spirit of experimentation and a belief in the role of the gentleman amateur as a source of renewal and reform together with a shifting sense of his German American identity and community as mapped onto an industrializing American landscape. Schmidt was an enthusiastic amateur precisely at the moment forest management was becoming increasingly professionalized and Americanized.4 He identified strongly as a second-generation immigrant just as World War I would challenge his ability to remain proudly German while claiming American allegiance.5 Prominent in the troubled German American pacifist movement, he turned to his projects on the land as an alternative source of German American community. He understood his identity as both a German and an American as a site of play and improvisation at a time when national identities were becoming more fixed and less flexible and...