The Lumbertowns: A Socioeconomic History Of Michigan's Leading Lumber Centers: Saginaw, Bay City, And Muskegon, 1870-1905.

Abstract

The three foremost lumbertowns in Michigan--Saginaw, Bay City, and Muskegon--evolved from the wilderness to become flourishing urban industrial centers by the last quarter of the nineteenth century. At the end of the century, though, exhausted timber supplies portended economic calamity for the principal logging communities. Thrown upon their own resources and reflecting individual cultural identities, each town developed dissimilar efforts to sustain urban industrial status. This study is a comparative history of three lumbertowns from their inception as frontier settlements to that crucial time period when depleted timber supplies compelled the logging centers to initiate determined efforts to survive. In the end all three communities managed to recover, however, each community interpreted progress--the ability of a town to effect sustained population growth and continued business expansion--somewhat differently. The varied interpretations of what constituted continued economic progress emanated from the leadership exhibited by the towns' lumbermen-entrepreneurs and the makeup of each lumbertown's ethnic workforce. Although, in part a narrative history, this dissertation is primarily a study of the role of entrepreneurship in urban economic development. To the extent that the entrepreneur was influenced by the cultural-ethnic construct of the city, it is also social history. Insight into entrepreneurship will demonstrate the privotal role that the lumberman-entrepreneur played in the successful redevelopment of declining natural resource communities. As important, the role of the absentee lumberman will be analyzed. Entrepreneurial leadership, though, was not always exercised in ideal socioeconomic environments. An important aspect of industrial recovery was the perception of community and its character. The study demonstrates that divergent cultural traits and economic practices developed not only out of variations in the nature of each towns' lumbermen-entrepreneurs, but also from significant differences that evolved with respect to ethnic composition. Entrepreneurship and ethnic composition are the twin themes that contribute to an explanation of why a community turned into a Saginaw or Muskegon, or a Bay City--that is, into cities of medium size, experiencing reasonable growth and prosperity, or a town of broken dreams, unfilled and limited ambitions.