The Ann Arbor Observer was loaded with enticing activities this week. The can’t-miss-it one for me was Rob Burg’s presentation on the history of logging in Michigan. Years ago, having just read William Davenport Hulbert’s White Pine Days on the Tahquamenon, I did a deep dive into the subject myself. This was during my time as a Girl Scout leader, and I got so geeked about the subject that, with our council’s blessing, I designed a badge on the subject.
Our troop visited a saw mill that, during our visit, came to the largest log it had ever handled. It was so big that even during the initial step of de-barking, management ordered everyone from the building except for the man controlling the equipment. The concern was that the load would exceed the tolerances of the machinery.
My other big memories of the mill were the piles of logs on the property, each one identified on the end by type of tree and expected board-feet of lumber, and the drying room. The drying room was an environmentally controlled shed for getting moisture out of lumber without warping it, and is also known as a kiln. The atmosphere inside reminded me of Wyoming in a drought.
The girls also camped at Hartwick Pines State Park, where we enjoyed a presentation by a young woman who was, at least at that time, the only female timber buyer in the state. She brought thin cross-sections of various types of trees and discussed their characteristics, as well as what it was like to work in such a male-dominated field. She left the cross-sections behind when she left, suggesting that we add them to our campfire, for which the girls were grateful.
We also went on a ranger-led, after-dark walk through the woods, culminating at the bunkhouse of the Michigan Logging Museum. The ranger unlocked it, invited us all inside, lit a fire in the pot-bellied stove, and regaled us with tales of life in a logging camp. It was a remarkable experience.
Rob Burg, Tuesday night’s speaker, used to be a historian at Hartwick Pines. Now, he goes by the descriptor, environmental historian, and continues his special interest in logging. My sweetheart and I arrived early at the Botanical Gardens, venue for the talk. Good thing. The room filled quickly. More chairs were trolleyed out, then more, and more still. All the chairs filled.
Burg started his presentation with the same question that had drawn me in long ago. Why did loggers go after white pine? The answer is two-fold: white pine is very useful in construction, and it floats. That latter aspect was critical, as the main means of transporting logs from forest to mill was by river. Burg dubbed white pine “green gold,” and said logging was to Michigan in the nineteenth century what the automotive industry was in the twentieth century.
Our speaker’s focus, on Tuesday, was on logging as an industry, rather than on life in the forest, although it was clear that he knows that aspect of logging as well. Further, he included great images in his presentation. He paused on one of a river full of logs being sorted according to logging company at the mill, and asked, “Can anyone tell me what my favorite part of this photograph is?”
We studied it intensely until a woman said, “The socks drying on the line.” She was right. In the middle of all the enterprise, someone had strung up a clothesline and hung his socks on it to dry.
On Wednesday, a friend of mine gave a presentation on the history of Christmas cards. Her venue was Ann Arbor’s Kempf House Museum. My big take-aways from Christine Crockett’s talk were the great influence of printing technology on cards, the extent to which early cards favored images of spring, and that assembling Christmas cards afforded women respectable jobs in a sheltered environment.
Thursday evening, my sweetheart and I attended the packed opening concert of the Washtenaw Community Concert Band season. Up first was a Sousa march that incorporated an instrument called a “jingling johnny,” a lovely structure laden with brass bells. The narrator said Sousa once conducted a 6,200-musician band in this march.
The rest of the program was not-too-scary music suitable for all the ages in the audience. The eighty-member band has a new director this season, J. Nick Smith, who brings showmanship and a bright energy to the mix. Band members wore costumes for the concert, and he strapped a dorsal fin to his Betelgeuse outfit during John Williams’s “Chillers and Thrillers.”
This was a fine week to be in Ann Arbor.
31 October 2025