Using Presettlement Vegetation Maps to Understand the Early History of Michigan's Lumber Industry in Midland County

THE MICHIGAN HISTORICAL REVIEW 37:2 (Fall 2011): 1-28©2011 by Central Michigan University. ISSN 0890-1686 All Rights Reserved. Using Presettlement Vegetation Maps to Understand the Early History of Michigan’s Lumber Industry in Midland County by Robert E. Mitchell Michigan’s boundaries were drawn during the process of negotiating the state’s acceptance into the Union in 1837. At that time, much of the state’s 57,324 square miles of land in the physically separate Lower and Upper peninsulas were largely uninhabited except for Native Peoples.1 Apart from very small patches of private holdings, the state’s lands were owned by the federal government. Settlement and economic development would have to be preceded by privatization.2 In 1837, land in Michigan had two primary uses: farming and logging. Aside from the early fur trade (followed later by mining in the Upper Peninsula), the state’s economy and population were tied to agricultural pursuits and forestry. Like human settlement, the development of these economic sectors would depend on the privatization of federal lands. Not all of the land in the state had agricultural or logging potential. Researchers have shown that the best soils for farming were unequally distributed within the state and that farmers who cultivated those soils 1 This number refers to land area only and excludes the state’s many lakes and rivers. According to one source, the state of Michigan comprises 36,424,662 acres. Information provided to the author by Sharon W. Waltman, Soil Scientist-Soil Geography, USDA-NRCS, Soil Survey Center, Lincoln, Neb. For other estimates, see Statistical Abstract of the United States, 2000: The National Data Book (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 2000), 228. Also see the Annual Report of the Commissioner of the General Land Office to the Secretary of the Interior (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, n.d.), S.exdoc 1 (33-1) and (33-2). The Lower Peninsula’s total land area is estimated to be 26,000,000 acres. 2 For a recent land-related history of the state, see Robert E. Mitchell, ―Towards a History of Privatizing Public Lands in Michigan, 1785–1860,‖ Michigan Academician 38 (September 2008): 121-48; Dallas Lee Jones, ―The Survey and Sale of the Public Land in Michigan, 1815-1862‖ (master’s thesis, Cornell University, 1952); Kenneth E. Lewis, West to Far Michigan: Settling the Lower Peninsula, 1815-1860 (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2002); and Paul W. Gates, History of Public Land Law Development (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1968). For a narrative history of early Michigan, see Willis F. Dunbar and George S. May, Michigan: A History of the Wolverine State (Grand Rapids, Mich.: W. B. Eerdmans, 1995). 2 The Michigan Historical Review prospered relative to farmers who cultivated less promising ones (as measured by fairly recent soil surveys). Scholarship also details that population growth was higher in soil-rich areas and this growth led to the elaboration of larger settlement systems and transportation linkages among them.3 Compared with the numerous accounts of soiland -population linkages, the relationship between vegetation and logging in Michigan has received less attention from researchers. Thus, this article focuses on the ties between pine forests and the patents 3 For the role that soils played in the settlement process, see Robert E. Mitchell, ―Antebellum Farm-Settlement Patterns: A Three-Level Approach to Assessing the Effects of Soils,‖ Journal of Interdisciplinary History 41 (Winter 2010): 393-420; and idem, ―Antebellum Michigan Farmers and Their Soils: Choices Had Consequences,‖ Michigan Academician 40 (March 2010): 1-21. Also see Lewis, West to Far Michigan. Early logging scene, Midland County, Michigan, undated (Photograph from the Midland County Historical Photograph Collection, courtesy of the Midland County Historical Society, Midland, Michigan.) Using Presettlement Vegetation Maps 3 that antebellum lumbermen filed in mid-Michigan’s pine-rich Midland County (located in the sixth tier of counties north of the Ohio border). Pine forests in this area and in more northerly counties tended not to overlap with the state’s more promising agricultural soils and farming conditions. For example, one source reported that grain-based agriculture was not viable north of a convex line...