When Menominee floated a forest down the river

Long before the sawmills, the mouth of the Menominee River was home to the Menominee people — the “wild rice people” whose name the river, the city, and the county all carry. Fur traders arrived in the 1790s, and in the early 1830s the river got its first sawmill. Then the great white-pine boom found it, and for half a century the river itself became a highway of logs.

The numbers are hard to picture. From the 1840s to about 1910, pine cut in the northwoods was floated down the Menominee to the mills at Menominee and its Wisconsin twin across the river, Marinette. A boom company formed in 1867 ran the drives with more than forty logging dams; in its busiest year, 1889, it sorted over four million pine logs, and at the peak in 1898 more than thirty sawmills worked the river. All told, local historians put the total haul at some ten billion feet of lumber, and say that in those years no port anywhere shipped more of it — the twin cities proudly styled themselves the White Pine Capital of the World. Menominee was chartered as a city in 1883, and by 1900 the two towns together held nearly thirty thousand people.

The pine ran out, as it did everywhere — the last log drive went down the river in 1917 — but Menominee didn’t fade. Beet sugar, paper, shipbuilding, and furniture took lumber’s place, and the twin-city bond never broke: Menominee and Marinette still share a newspaper and a hospital system today, and Menominee even keeps Wisconsin’s clock, running on Central time. Walk the waterfront now and you’re strolling where the log booms once stretched across the river.