The little railroad at Lake George that changed how Michigan logged

Winfield Scott Gerrish had a problem most lumbermen would have walked away from. He’d gotten his hands on roughly 12,000 acres of pine on the west side of Clare County, but it sat six to ten miles from any stream big enough to float logs out. In the lumber business of the 1870s, that distance was a death sentence — without a river you couldn’t move the timber, so it just stood there.

The fix came to him at a machinery exhibit, where he saw a small steam locomotive on display and pictured it pulling sleds of logs through the woods. In the winter of 1877 he built it: about six miles of track running from Lake George northwest to the headwaters of the Muskegon River, where the logs could finally hit floating water. The Lake George & Muskegon River Railroad hauled nothing but logs, and it worked.

People have called Gerrish’s line the first logging railroad in Michigan, and you’ll still hear it said. The truth is a little muddier — a number of Michigan outfits had run logs on rails before 1877, some with steam engines. What set Gerrish apart was that his line was a loud, visible success at exactly the right moment, and the rest of the industry came running to copy it. Ten years later Michigan had 89 logging railroads, more than any state in the country, and the rivers stopped being the only way out of the woods.

Lake George today is a quiet lake community in Lincoln Township, the kind of place you’d never guess had been the launching pad for an industrial idea. The pine that justified the whole gamble was cut and gone within a generation — but the railroads it inspired kept rolling through Michigan’s woods for decades.