Kingsford: the town Ford built, the charcoal on your grill

In 1920, the land that’s now Kingsford held about forty people. Then came Henry Ford. The automaker wanted northern hardwood for his cars — Model T’s used plenty of wood — and he turned to Edward G. Kingsford, an Iron Mountain Ford dealer who happened to be married to Ford’s cousin. Kingsford arranged the purchase of more than three hundred thousand acres of Upper Peninsula timberland, and Ford built a giant sawmill and parts plant here, with a planned town around it. The village chartered in 1923 took its agent’s name, and at the peak in the mid-1920s the Ford operations employed several thousand people making wooden parts — including, famously, the bodies for Ford’s wood-sided “Woody” station wagons.

The masterstroke was the waste. Ford hated throwing anything away, so a chemical plant went up in 1924 to cook the sawmill’s scrap wood into useful byproducts — chief among them charcoal, pressed into tidy little pillow-shaped briquettes and sold through Ford dealerships across the country as Ford Charcoal Briquettes. During World War II the plant turned to making wooden troop-carrying gliders for the Army, and after the war, when cars no longer needed wood, Ford closed up shop in 1951. Local businessmen bought the chemical works, renamed the product after the town — and Kingsford Charcoal Briquettes became the household name that still sits beside grills all over America. The plant itself made charcoal here until the early 1960s.

The tidy footnote: Edward Kingsford himself never owned a piece of the briquette business — he had died in 1943 — but his name ended up on the bag, the city, and half the cookouts in the country. Around town you’ll still find Ford’s fingerprints everywhere: the Ford Airport, the Ford Dam, Ford Park.