Ojibway Island: the lumber baron's gift that holds Saginaw's fireworks

On the Fourth of July, half of Saginaw seems to drift toward a small island in the river. Ojibway Island sits in the Saginaw River right downtown, a green spit of land you reach by a short bridge, and it’s where the city’s fireworks go up every summer. The rest of the year it’s quieter — anglers on the docks, country-music concerts on the grass, ice fishing when the channel freezes.

The island is part of a larger gift. Ezra Rust made a fortune in the lumber boom of the 1800s, the era when Saginaw’s sawmills were cutting white pine faster than anywhere on earth, and he later added iron-mine money from Minnesota. When the pine ran out, Rust bequeathed land to the city for parks. That bequest became Rust Park — and to this day it makes up more than half of Saginaw’s entire park system. He reportedly needed a nudge to do it, from his friend William S. Linton, then head of the local board of trade.

The name nods to the Ojibwe (also called Chippewa), the Anishinaabe people whose homeland this valley was long before the mills. The river itself carries the older story; the island carries the lumber one.

It’s a strange, fitting layering when you stand there. The very ground sits in the heart of the old sawmill district, on a river that floated millions of logs to the blades. Now it’s lawn and shade trees and a bandshell, and once a year the sky over the water fills with light while families spread blankets on land that a timber millionaire decided the whole town should keep.