South Boardman: four churches, five saloons, then a fire

In 1918, South Boardman had four churches and five saloons. That tells you most of what you need to know about a Michigan lumber town at its peak: plenty of God, plenty of whiskey, and a lot of men far from home cutting timber.

The place got going around 1872, where the Grand Rapids & Indiana Railroad crossed the south branch of the Boardman River, about eight miles southwest of Kalkaska. It started tiny — twenty-five people — but the woods were thick and the river gave it water power, and the lumber years did the rest. By 1918 some four hundred people lived there, and the little town carried a boarding house, a flour mill, two hotels, three sawmills, a post office, and those five saloons. Groceries, though, meant a long haul: residents sometimes walked all the way to Traverse City and back for supplies before the stores filled in.

Then, in 1923, fire came through the business district and burned it out — the shops, the stores, the works. Lumber towns lived and died by fire and by how long the trees held out, and South Boardman had run short on both. The crowds thinned, the mills fell quiet, and the town settled into something much smaller than it had been.

It never disappeared, though. Drive through today and you’ll find a post office, a small museum, and a scatter of old storefronts that people have turned into houses — the bones of a once-busy main street, quietly lived in. South Boardman is the kind of place northern Michigan has dozens of: a town that was loud and crowded for one short generation of cut timber, and has spent the century since being a peaceful little crossroads instead.