Goodland Township: the fires took the trees, so the plows came

Fire decided what Goodland Township would become. It opened in the 1850s the way most of the Thumb did — as a lumber community, men cutting the white pine and floating or hauling it out. Then two of the worst wildfires in Michigan history came through, the great fire of 1871 and the Thumb fire of 1881, and burned across the township a decade apart. After the second one, the lumber era here was essentially over. There wasn’t enough timber left worth the trouble.

What there was, after the fire, was cleared land. Stumps and ash, but cleared. So the people who stayed put down plows instead of saws, and Goodland has been farm country ever since — better than a century and a half of corn, beans, hay, and dairy where the pine forest used to stand. It’s a quiet outcome to a violent start: the same fires that killed people and leveled towns across the Thumb also did the brutal work of clearing the ground a farmer would otherwise have spent years fighting.

You can read the whole arc in the township’s own name, which sounds like an advertisement and, for the second act, turned out to be one. Lumber towns boom and then hollow out when the trees are gone; farm towns just keep going, season after season. Goodland skipped the hollowing-out by switching crops, from trees to row crops, after the flames made the choice for it.

Drive the section roads today, five miles or so out from Imlay City, and it’s open and flat and green, the grid of a farming township laid over land that two fires once swept clean. The pine is a memory. The fields are the inheritance.