The 80-foot chimney that outlived a whole town's mills

There’s a stone chimney standing alone on the Lake Huron beach at Port Hope, about 80 feet of it, and nothing else around. No walls, no roof, no mill — just the chimney, nine by ten feet at the base, pointing straight up out of the sand. A mason named John Geitz laid it up in 1858 for William R. Stafford’s sawmill, and it has stood there ever since while everything attached to it burned, rotted, or washed away.

Port Hope grew up around that mill. For about twenty years it was a real lumber town on the Thumb’s east shore, sawing pine and shipping it out, and salt-making on the side when the timber money was good. Then came the fires. The mill and docks burned in 1871, the town clawed its way back, and then the Great Thumb Fire of 1881 swept through and took it all again. After the second fire the big pine was gone for good, and Port Hope traded lumbering for farming like the rest of the Thumb.

The chimney is the last one of its kind in the state — the only sawmill chimney still standing in Michigan from the whole lumbering era. The mill site went onto the National Register of Historic Places in 1987, and the state planted a historical marker by it. People drive out to the lake just to see it, which is a strange afterlife for a thing built only to carry smoke away from a saw.

It’s easy to miss what it really marks. Half the towns in the Thumb started exactly like this — a mill, a dock, a boom, a fire — and then quietly became farm country. Most of them left nothing you can point at. Port Hope left a chimney.