Chase: the town with no river and seventeen mill whistles

Most Michigan lumber towns grew up on a river, because the cheapest way to move a felled pine was to float it. Chase had a problem: no stream near it ran big enough to carry logs. By every rule of the era, that should have made Chase a non-starter. Instead it made Chase a railroad town — and for a few roaring years, one of the busiest places in Lake County.

The fix was the logging railroad. Once track could reach the timber, crews didn’t have to wait for spring floods or build near water; they could haul logs out in any season, straight to the mill. The rails opened the floodgates in eastern Lake County, and Chase filled up fast. By the mid-1880s the town had swelled into the thousands, and on a working day you could hear seventeen different sawmill whistles blowing across it.

Behind those whistles was a whole town. Chase had two churches, a school, a hotel, a blacksmith, a gunsmith, a boot-and-shoe shop, dry goods and general stores, and the post office that made it official. The Pere Marquette Railroad ran through it, and on a hot June day in 1910 the summer heat buckled the expanding rails and threw a train off the track a mile west of town — the kind of accident a railroad town came to expect.

Then the pine that fed seventeen mills ran out, the way it always did. The whistles fell silent one by one, the people drifted off after the work, and Chase shrank back toward the handful of buildings still standing at the crossroads. A town built on rails instead of a river had no river to fall back on when the trees were gone.