The First Logging Railroads in the Great Lakes Region

Abstract

Transportation has always been a major, if not the major, cost that Great Lakes lumbermen faced in converting "sawlogs into currency?''1 During the middle of the nineteenth century logs were skidded (dragged directly on the ground), moved on sleighs, and/or trucked on wagons to streams where they could be floated to sawmills. Not only were these modes of transportation costly, they were not always reliable. Warm winters, called "open' often made sleighing impossible and trucking through the slush and mud too difficult. Some loggers, faced with long expensive hauls overland and unpredictable weather, attempted to lower their costs by using logging railroads to transport logs to streams or directly to sawmills. Winfield Scott Gerrish's Lake George and Muskegon River Railroad, which began operating in 1877, has often been claimed to be the first logging railroad in the Great Lakes region.2 Gerrish reported that he thought of using a railroad to transport logs after he saw a small Baldwin locomotive on exhibit at the Centennial Exposition at Philadelphia in 1876.3 The open winter of 1878-79 focussed attention on Gerrish's logging railroad and led numerous other Michigan lumbermen to imitate him. Gerrish's place in lumbering and railroad history is secure because his successful and wellpublicized experiment triggered the rapid expansion of logging railroads in Michigan and other regions of the country. However, Gerrish was not the first to transport logs by rail, or by steam locomotive, in Michigan. Leslie Arndt and others have claimed since 1973 that the Pinconning and Kaiserville Railroad (later known as the Glencoe and Pinconning), which began operating in 1873 in Bay County, was the state's first steam locomotive logging railroad.4 The geographer Randall Rohe, in his technological history of the use of tramways and pole railroads in the Great Lakes, has traced the history of logging railroads back to 1855. He reports that "The earliest known ... wooden railroad [used] for logging in the Great Lakes region is one built during the summer of 1855 at Tawas, Michigan" on the shore of Lake Huron.5 Considerable documentary evidence shows that lumbermen logging along the Grand River in Michigan's Ottawa County had already built and operated three logging railroads before 1855the year the first part of the Tawas logging railroad was built on the east side of the state. The fourth logging railroad constructed in Ottawa County began using a steam locomotive to haul logs on wooden rails in 1857. The history of these long-forgotten logging railroads is an important first chapter in the use of railroads to haul logs.6 These lines, some of which ran more than two decades before Gerrish's operation, were thus the first logging railroads in Michigan, and possibly in the Great Lakes region or even the United States as a whole. In short, a closer look at the history of logging railroads contradicts the "heroic lone innovator" theory that shapes most published accounts of W. S. Gerrish's "invention." Log transport by rail instead developed through multiple independent inventionsactually a transfer of technologiesand gradual evolution enforced by economic competition.7 Some historians have classified logging railroads by basic type into pole roads, tram or stringer roads, and steam railroads.8 But Michigan lumbermen employed these variants in many diverse ways. Some ran geared Shay locomotives on wooden pole roads in 1880; others used horses to draw logging cars on iron rails as late as 1910.9 The history of railroads used to haul logs as well as other commodities can best be understood by focusing on specific innovations in technology and business organization. During the mid-to-late nineteenth century in Michigan, important changes occurred in: the materials used to construct rails (wooden poles,