Luce County History
Author: Roger L. Rosentreter
Original Publication Date: March/April 1986
The first record of white visitors to Luce County was a
desperate plea from the swamplands in the northeastern Upper Peninsula.
Surveyor William A. Burt, writing to his wife in 1840, noted that the
wilderness had ruined his coats and pants: he asked that she make him a pair
of pants of "the strongest kind of bedticking" that would "stand the brush."
Over 150 years later, Luce County retains many of the
wilderness characteristics that led to Burt's desperate plea for new
clothes. About 40 percent of the county, which is bisected by the
Tahquamenon and Two Hearted rivers, is classified as swampland. Luce's
nearly six hundred lakes and ponds place it second in this category among
all Michigan counties. (Marquette County is first.) The county's thirty-mile
Lake Superior coastline is beautiful but barren, and forty percent of the
county lies in the Lake Superior and Tahquamenon River state forests.
Except for sparse lumbering activity in the 1870s and
the establishment of a lifesaving station at the mouth of the Two Hearted
River on Lake Superior in 1876, Luce remained void of white settlers until
the Detroit, Mackinac and Marquette Railroad opened between St. lgnace and
Marquette in 1881. A year after the opening of the railroad, a Detroit
entrepreneur and former congressman, John S. Newberry, who had been involved
in the railroad venture, joined other businessmen in founding the Vulcan
Furnace Company. Located beside the railroad in south central Luce, the
company used the area's abundant hardwood forests to create charcoal for
iron smelting.
The Vulcan Furnace prospered, and company houses and
stores provided the foundation for the settlement of Newberry, which was
incorporated in 1885. With most of the county's two thousand people,
Newberry became the county seat when Luce, named for Governor Cyrus Luce,
was organized in 1887.
Luce's organization came at a time when Newberry was
enjoying rapid growth. The Newberry News reported in 1886 that ten new
buildings had been completed and more structures were planned. Consuming one
thousand acres of timber annually in its brick kilns, the Vulcan Furnace
dominated Newberry's economy. Other timber-related industries in the area
included sawmills at Muskallonge Lake in northern Luce and at Dollarville, a
small community west of Newberry. The Chesbrough Brothers mill at the mouth
of the Tahquamenon River in Chippewa County also cut many Luce County logs.
Logging supported Newberry in many ways. According to
historian Charles S. Taylor, the license fees from as many as sixteen
saloons that served the lumberjacks on their annual spring sojourn to the
governmental seat "paid most, if not all, of the costs of running the
village government."
As happened elsewhere in Michigan once the trees were
cut, Luce's cutover land was promoted as a ready-made opportunity for
farmers. In 1886 the Newberry News boasted of farmlands in southwestern
Luce, near Manistique Lake, that were "being settled by an honest and
industrious class of people" and would make the area "one of the most
wealthy agricultural townships in the upper peninsula." The News also
bragged about "Mr. Pendleton," who started a farm to the south of Newberry
"without enough of life's supporting elements to last a week." After
struggling for four years "with the inconveniences of the wilderness,"
Pendleton enjoyed "an independent living ... a tranquil home" and even had
money to lend. By 1890, Luce had 55 farms and 1,614 acres of improved
farmland. Its three most important crops were hay, oats and potatoes.
In 1925, Luce's last sawmill, the one at Shelldrake,
closed. Farming continued to grow. By 1920 the number of farms had reached
194, and the amount of improved farmland had increased to over ten thousand
acres.
One of the most important events in Newberry's growth
and stability occurred in 1895 when the Upper Peninsula Hospital for the
Insane and Feeble Minded opened. One of seven Upper Peninsula towns bidding
for the hospital, Newberry offered the state over five hundred acres of land
a mile south of town as an incentive. The facility, Michigan's fourth state
hospital, was completed in 1903. It consisted of an administration building,
a hospital and fourteen resident cottages arranged in a quadrangle. The
structures were connected by a covered porch. Staff housing was added south
of the quadrangle.
With a capacity of 985 residents, the hospital offered a
variety of things to do. Besides playing billiards and checkers, the
residents held weekly dances and enjoyed concerts by the hospital band. They
also worked on the hospital farm, where vegetables, grains, cattle and hogs
were raised.
Luce and Newberry flourished during the early twentieth
century. By 1910, Luce's population exceeded four thousand; over 25 percent
of whom lived in Newberry. That town's school system had developed to a
point where its graduates were admitted, according to historian Alvah
Sawyer, "to any college in Michigan" without examination. The Hospital for
the Insane, now known as the Newberry State Hospital, added several training
facilities for hospital attendants between 1897 and 1911. In 1912, the
hospital housed over eight hundred residents.
Equally important to Luce's economy was the Vulcan
Furnace, which became part of the Lake Superior Iron and Chemical Company in
1910. That company operated six furnaces and chemical plants of which
Newberry's facility was the largest and most modern. The Newberry plant's
most impressive structure was a 70-by-400-foot retort (distillery), which
converted two hundred cords of wood into charcoal each day. Unlike the
earlier, more wasteful kilns, the retort system collected a large amount of
alcohol and lime, byproducts of the charcoaling process. The annual value of
the byproducts (3.4 million gallons of wood alcohol and 61.5 million pounds
of lime) exceeded the value of the 200,000 tons of pig iron smelted annually
at the plant.
The Lake Superior Iron and Chemical Plant, then called
the Newberry Lumber and Chemical Company, closed in 1945. But the state
hospital continues to play a vital role in Newberry's economy.
Extensive WPA building projects in the late 1930s
upgraded the facility. Today, the hospital, known as the Newberry Regional
Mental Health Center, employs approximately 350 workers and is the area's
largest employer.
Commercial logging has made a resurgence in Luce, while
farming has declined in importance. The Louisiana-Pacific Corporation Plant
in Newberry, which opened in 1985, employs one hundred workers in the
manufacture of particleboard. Conversely, there are now only thirty farms in
Luce, and only twelve have sales that exceed $10,000 annually. Currently,
Luce has a population of approximately seven thousand; among all Michigan
counties, only Keweenaw has fewer people.
The 1937 purchase of land around the Upper Falls of the
Tahquamenon River by the State of Michigan laid the foundation for the
establishment of Tahquamenon Falls State Park. Boasting Michigan's largest
waterfall, the park attracts thousands of annual visitors to Luce's
wilderness. But its paths and roads negate the need for clothes of "the
strongest kind of bedticking."
Listed on the National Register of Historic Places, the
1894 county jail and sheriff's residence in Newberry serves as the county
historical museum. It is open during the summer months.
Bibliographic Note
Sources used in preparing this article include A Brief History of the
Tahquamenon Valley (1976) by Charles Sprague Taylor and The History
of the Northern Peninsula of Michigan (1912) by Alvah Sawyer.
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