The mill over the waterfall that started Whitehall

Charles Mears showed up at White Lake late in 1837 and did something blunt and clever: he built his sawmill directly on top of a waterfall. Setting the mill over the falling water let him capture the most power from it, and by 1838 the blades were running, turning the first White Lake pine into boards. It was the first waterpower sawmill on the lake, and it was the beginning of everything that followed.

What followed was a stampede. Within a decade four mills were working the streams that fed White Lake, and by 1883 there were thirteen of them ringing the water, screaming through pine, hemlock, and cedar that men floated down the rivers to be cut. Logs came down, lumber went out — rafted across the lake and loaded onto schooners bound for the building cities of the Midwest. When Chicago burned in the great fire of 1871, White Lake’s mills were among the ones that shipped the lumber to put the city back up.

Mears himself thought big. Over the years he bought tens of thousands of acres, ran a string of mills up the Michigan coast, and built harbors to ship his lumber out. He and a partner laid out the village beside White Lake in 1857 and first called it Mears, after himself; the name changed to Whitehall in 1862. (He left his own surname on a different town a county north.)

The pine could not last, and it did not. The lumber era on White Lake closed in 1907 when the Staples and Covell Mill shut down, the last of the thirteen to go quiet. By then the great forests were stumps and the town had to find a new way to live. But it all traces back to one stubborn decision in 1837 — a man who looked at a waterfall and decided to build his mill right on top of it.