Porch Notes
The Eastern White Pine
History and culture
When Michigan named the eastern white pine its state tree in 1955, it was honoring the tree that built the state — and that the state nearly cut down to the last trunk.
The white pine is a giant, straight and soft-wooded, once towering 150 feet and more over much of northern Michigan. In the decades after the Civil War, that timber became “green gold.” Michigan led the nation in lumber production, and the great pineries of the Saginaw Valley and the north were felled at astonishing speed, the logs floated down rivers each spring to the mills. The lumber raised cities across the Midwest — and built lumber-baron fortunes that helped seed Michigan’s next industries. By the early 1900s, the old-growth white pine was nearly gone, the north a stumpy “cutover.”
So the state tree carries a double meaning: pride in what the white pine gave Michigan, and a reminder of what unchecked cutting cost. A few precious stands of the old giants survive to show what was lost.
Where to see it
Hartwick Pines State Park near Grayling protects one of Michigan's last old-growth white pine stands and tells the logging story; white pines grow throughout the state.