When I read Daniel James Brown’s excellent The Boys in the Boat, the descriptions of the Joe Rantz’s time in the logging camps as a boy were so vivid, I felt like I was there, or had been there at one time. I’ve felt the same when I’ve read other logging camp accounts. I didn’t realize until this summer when I went back to Hartwick Pines State Park that I had been there, or at least I had been to the Logging Museum at Hartwick Pines. My childhood experiences there must have been so vivid, that I easy connected with the descriptions of the camps and the work of logging with hand tools.

Outsiders do not usually associate Midwestern states like Michigan with forested landscapes. Say Michigan and people think cars and Detroit, but Michigan was once almost entirely forested. Actually most of New England, New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Wisconsin were forested as well, and the trees in the forest were largely White Pines. The White Pine, in many ways, is the defining tree of the North Woods. They dominated a band stretching from New England to Minnesota. In one of my favorite books, A Natural History of Trees of Eastern and Central North America, Donald Culross Peattie describes the original White Pine forest of North America beautifully:

Pioneers used to say that a squirrel could travel a squirrel’s lifetime without ever coming down out of the White Pines, and save for the intersection of rivers this may have been but slight hyperbole. When the male flowers bloomed in these illimitable pineries, thousands of miles of forest were swept with the golden smoke of this reckless fertility, and great storms of pollen were swept from the primeval shores far out to sea and to the superstitious sailor seemed to be “raining brimstone” on the deck.

Wow! To walk through one of these “illimitable pineries” must have been awe-inspiring. I can’t fathom what this must have been like. And that is because all these pines were cut. The first colonists needed wood for homes, fuel and profit. The Royal Navy wanted the largest trees for ships masts, and while costly to import, the White Pines were superior to what was available to them from other parts of Europe. The forests seemed an endless resource, and intensive logging operations were underway.

Once New England and New York were logged, the lumbermen moved into Michigan as it was surveyed, claimed and purchased the best stands of trees. I couldn’t find where the first sawmills were in Michigan, but my Sierra Club Naturalist’s Guide to the North Woods (another of my favorites) says that loggers began started operations in the 1830’s, that in 1835 a sawmill was set up in Augusta, just outside Kalamazoo.

Logging was most active in the winter, when the snow and ice could be used to more easily move the logs out of the forest and to the banks of rives were they waited until spring. Rivers were the main transport system, so when the spring thaw came, the logs were floated downstream to the sawmills.

By 1900, Michigan produced over 160 billion board feet of pine. That’s 573 square miles of wood one inch thick! As impossible to imagine what Michigan looked like when all that wood was a living breathing forest, it is more impossible to imagine how the landscape must have looked after it had been stripped of trees. It is even more difficult to imagine how it looked after wildfires ripped through the logged areas, burning so intensely that the seeds from the White Pine (which has adapted to fire) were killed, along with the seeds from virtually all other trees. The stumps still held enough moisture not resist burning. You can still find old stumps that survived these fires around the state. They are often in open fields, called stump prairies, because the land never recovered from the burns. The thin topsoil literally cooked.

Hartwick Pines State Park preserves one of the few large stands of uncut White Pine forest in Michigan. A daughter of a logging barren purchased over 8,000 acres, and donated it to the State of Michigan. The gift included 85 acres of Old Growth White Pine Forest. The trees that remain today tower around 150 feet, with diameters of over four feet, and are about 360 years old.

We stopped at Hartwick Pines to show my wife the Old Growth, and to hopefully catch a glimpse of the Evening Grosbeaks that can sometimes be spotted at the Visitor Center Feeders. The feeders felt a little bit like a zoo – we walked in and there were the Evening Grosbeaks with several Rose-Breasted Grosbeaks. It doesn’t often happen like that. After watching the birds a bit, we decided to walk the Old Growth Trail.

Taking a walk through the old growth stand provides a good sense of what these forests might have looked like. We picked up a brochure for a self-guided tour, and dutifully stopped at each of the numbered posts. The tour brought our attention to the not-so-subtle (but easily overlooked) differences between the Old Growth area, and the second growth areas surrounding it.

Much of the second growth forest is hardwood – Beech and Maple (including some Striped Maples – a true sign you are in the North Woods). These trees need light, and when the pines were cut, a lot of light made it to the forest floor. As we continued on the trail, it got darker and darker. The pines (White and Red) and Eastern Hemlock block out a lot of light. The forest becomes more open, because the sunlight that most plants need just isn’t there. There is little in the way of underbrush, and the ground is covered with fallen needles. The trees also lose their lower branches as well as their crowns prevent the light from reaching them.

The trees are not immune to the forces of nature. The roots here are relatively shallow, so there are many downed trees. Every spot where a large tree comes down is covered in green – the beech and maple seedlings waiting in the soil soaking up the sunlight, competing to fill the void. This makes the forest feel very dynamic, and the contrasts between the openings and the Old Growth are dramatic. The trail ends in a second-growth forest about 120 years old. There are oaks and birches in this section, along with many smaller White Pines perhaps beginning the cycle of succession again.

The second-growth White Pines I know are beautiful trees, but I have seen few that reach the grandeur they once reached. I love the soft whoosh of the wind through the pines, and the instant quiet that I sense when I enter a pine forest from a different habitat. The White Pine has 5 long, thin, bright green needles that are soft to the touch. I’ve been told that the five needles represent the five original Iroquois Nations – the Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga and Seneca. (Or they just spell out what kind of pine it is. W-H-I-T-E) The bark on younger trees is smooth and shiny. When they are older, the tree is a different thing all together. Hartwick Pines is wonderfully accessible place to experience the forest.

Because I am married to a librarian (and because these are all great books worth reading):

Brown, Daniel. The Boys in the Boat: Nine Americans and Their Epic Quest for Gold At the 1936 Berlin Olympics. Viking, 2013.

Daniel, Glenda and Jerry Sullivan. A Sierra Club Naturalist’s Guide to the North Woods of Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota. Sierra Club Books, 1981.

Peattie, Donald Culross. A Natural History of Trees of Eastern and Central North America. Houghton Mifflin, 1948.

Rutkow, Eric. American Canopy: Trees, Forests, and the Making of a Nation. Scribner, 2012.