Higgins Lake's other story: the nursery that helped replant Michigan

Higgins Lake is best known for its clear, cold water — but it also holds a remarkable piece of conservation history on its north shore. Beginning in 1903 the state ran a tree nursery here that grew into one of the largest seedling nurseries in the world, raising the young pines used to replant Michigan’s forests after the logging era stripped them bare. In the 1930s the federal Civilian Conservation Corps set up a camp at the nursery, part of an effort in which Michigan’s CCC planted hundreds of millions of trees statewide — more than any other state.

That history is preserved at the Higgins Lake Nursery and CCC Museum, run by the Michigan History Center, with exhibits and a reconstructed CCC barracks. It sits inside North Higgins Lake State Park, which is just over the county line on the lake’s north shore, in Crawford County — about a 15-minute drive from the village of Roscommon. (The Roscommon-county side of the lake has its own state park, South Higgins Lake State Park.)

For anyone settling near Higgins Lake, it’s a good reminder that the woods and parks you’ll enjoy here were largely planted by hand within the last century — with a museum a few minutes away that tells exactly how.