Lumberman's Monument: three bronze loggers on the Au Sable bluff

Three bronze men stand around a log on a high bluff over the Au Sable River, frozen mid-job since 1932. One is a timber cruiser, the scout who walked ahead through the woods sizing up the pine. One is a sawyer, his crosscut saw slung over a shoulder. The third is a river rat, leaning on a peavey — the spiked pole drivers used to wrangle floating logs downstream. Together they make up Lumberman’s Monument, a 14-foot statue dedicated on July 16, 1932 to the men who cut the white pine that built much of the Midwest.

The sculptor was Robert Ingersoll Aitken, the same artist who carved the west pediment of the U.S. Supreme Court. By the time the monument went up, the big pine was long gone. Loggers had stripped this country bare in a few decades, floating the logs down the Au Sable to mills near the lake, and what they left behind was stumps and sand. The monument is part memorial, part apology — it sits inside the Huron National Forest, planted on land that had to be reforested after the cutting was done.

The view is the other reason to come. The bronze stands at the edge of a bluff that drops to the river far below, with stairs leading down toward the water. From up top you look out over the wide green sweep of the Au Sable valley, the same river the log drives ran. The site sits along the River Road Scenic Byway, a 22-mile drive between Oscoda and the country near Hale, and the Forest Service has run a visitor center here since 1982 — a long log cabin where staff tell the lumbering story to the crowd that rolls through every summer.

Stand at the rail in the morning, before the day-trippers arrive, and it’s quiet enough to hear the river the loggers once filled with pine.