The Shrine of the Pines

A few miles south of Baldwin, on the banks of the Pere Marquette River, stands one of the most unusual museums in Michigan: the Shrine of the Pines. It’s a log lodge filled with furniture, and every piece was made by one man from the stumps and roots of white pine trees.

Back when this country was being logged, the great white pines that once covered northern Michigan were cut down by the millions, leaving the land full of stumps. A hunting and fishing guide named Raymond Overholzer hated to see the trees gone, and over nearly thirty years he gathered up those leftover stumps and roots and shaped them, by hand, into tables, chairs, beds, and lamps. He worked the wood into smooth, flowing forms and polished it to a deep glow. By the time he finished, he had made more than two hundred pieces, including a dining table cut from a single seven-hundred-pound stump. It’s said the carmaker Henry Ford once offered him a fortune for that table, and that he turned it down flat.

Overholzer built the lodge in the 1930s to hold his life’s work and named it the Shrine of the Pines, a tribute to the trees he loved. Today it’s the largest collection of white pine rustic furniture in the world, kept just as he left it. It’s open to visitors in the warmer months, well worth the short drive south of town.