North Country History with Rob Burg

With this episode we honor Memorial Day with the story of Russell A. Alger. Alger rose from poverty in Ohio, when he was orphaned at age 12, to a lumberman and cavalry officer in the Civil War.  Having moved to Grand Rapids, Michigan in 1860, he engaged in the lumber business in the Grand River valley. After the Civil War began in April 1861, Russel Alger volunteered for the Union Army in August,...

News this week out of the Trump Administration in Washington is that there are plans to relocate the headquarters of the U.S. Forest Service from Washington, D.C. to Salt Lake City, Utah. Along with this there are plans to downsize the staffing of the forest service, downsize reseach offices from 57 to 19, and open up more of the federally owned forest lands to logging and other operations. There...

In honor of Women's History Month, this week's guest Emily Macgillivray (The Outdoors Historian) joins the podcast to share the story of  Ozhaawashkodwekwe, also known as Susan Johnston, an Ojibwe woman born in the Chequamegon Bay region of Lake Superior (Wisconsin), married to an Irish fur trader and a leader of her tribal clan in Bawating (Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan) where she owned a...

When the University of Michigan's School of Forestry was created in 1903, it was understood that an experimental forest was needed where forestry students could learn their trade. Saginaw, Michigan lumberman and University of Michigan Regent Arthur Hill stepped in and purchased an 80 acre tract of worn out farm land just east of the city of Ann Arbor for the program to develop the "Sagin...

Sportsmen and sportswomen have come to the Pigeon River Country for more than a century to recreate in the forest. Hunting and fishing have been the primary choices for outdoor recreation for many, but the state forest is also a prime spot for morel mushroom hunting, wild berry picking, camping, hiking and backpacking, horseback riding, and more. In 1986, one such visitor was former President of t...

Among the work of the Civilian Conservation Corps in Minnesota in the 1930s was the development of Gooseberry Falls State Park, one of Minnesota's most popular state parks along the north shore of Lake Superior. In 1934 the CCC arrived to build a camp on a bend of the Gooseberry River where it descends to Lake Superior. The work that Company 2710 would do at Gooseberry Falls for the next seve...

Conservationist and Forest Advocate P.S. Lovejoy called the Pigeon River Forest "The Big Wild." It is one of the largest contiguous forest lands in Michigan at now over 118,000 acres. Like much of the forests of the Great Lakes, it has had its rebirth in the 20th century after the success of the 19th century lumber industry and the subsequent wildfires that followed.  Ernest Hemingway su...

In honor of Black History Month, I want to introduce a unique story in Michigan History to my listeners, the story of Frank W. May, a man who was born into enslavement in Kentucky prior to the American Civil War, and after emancipation raised himself to the ownership of a sawmill in Detroit and a lumberman owning a modest logging operation in Otsego County in the Northern Lower Peninsula in the 18...

In this special episode that both celebrates the one year anniversay of the North Country History with Rob Burg podcast and celbrates the Christmas Holiday season, I share 19th Century writer John W. Fitzmaurice recounting of the celebration of Christmas in a Northern Michigan Logging Camp in 1883. Read from his book "The Shanty Boy.": Or, Life in a Lumber Camp , which recounts his exper...

In this bonus episode of the North Country History with Rob Burg podcast, I am presenting the story of my late uncle, Dudley Foster and his experiences as a sailor in the U.S. Navy at the Invasion of Normandy, June 6, 1944.  Dud and his wife Ang, my dad's older sister, retired to their own North Country retreat on the banks of the AuSable River just outside of Grayling, Michigan in the mid-19...

In 2014-2015 long before I became a podcaster I briefly had a blog called "A Taste of the North Country." In it I explored the food found in the North, both historic and contemporary. At the time I was only working as a freelance historical presenter and writer, so I was doing as much economizing with food as possible, including foraging wild food (mostly wild berries), and doing my own...

One of the greatest extinction events happened in the forests of the Great Lakes region and Eastern North America: the Passenger Pigeon. Kyle Bagnall, the Park Naturalist for the Mackinac State Historic Parks joins me as my guest to talk about this bird, that was once the most populous bird species on the planet and how it came to being extinct in the early 20th Century.  Kyle, a fellow environmen...

From July 31-August 16 I went on my first official North Country History Podcast Tour to the Northern Lower Peninsula and the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, Northern Wisconsin, and Northeastern Minnesota. I visited numerous places, learned a lot of new information and met many great people.  In this final episode of the second season of the podcast, I recount my tour, visiting the numerous places th...

Happy Labor Day! To conclude this three part series on the Labor of Logging, we look into the work at the saw mills and in the milltowns. In 1885 it was reported that there were 50,000 men working in the lumber industry in Michigan, with 20,000 employed in saw mills. As I like to say about the lumber industry, it was to Michigan in the 19th century as what the automobile industry was to the state...

In this second part of the Labor of Logging, I look at the labor involved with the Spring River Drives and the use of Boom Companies. The labor was the most important part of the log drives, without the men working the rivers, the logs would have never made it down the rivers to the sawmills. The drives could be very dangerous, with many men seriously injured or killed. I share a first-person acco...

In this first of two parts episodes in honor of Labor Day, we learn about the work that was done in the woods through the memories of John J. Heilala, who was a sixteen year-old boy who went to work in an Upper Peninsula logging camp, Ferguson's Camp 33, in 1904. John Heilala shared these memories 48 years later in an article of the same title in the March 1952 issue of Michigan History magaz...

Like Paul Bunyan and his companion, Babe the Blue Ox, agropelters, side hill gougers, and squonks, the Hodag was a mythical being found in the forests of the North Country. The Hodag was "discovered" by Eugene Shepard of Rhinelander, Wisconsin in 1896 and aided in its creation by Luke "Lakeshore" Kearney, a skilled woodcarver and storyteller. Like many of these tall tales and m...

This episode is an opinion piece on where do you think "Up North" begins. Is it a geographic location or where you start to feel that you are "Up North." I will tell you where I think "Up North" begins in Michigan. I don't have an opinion on Wisconsin or Minnesota, but if you are from these states or vacation in them, then you know. Same if you live in Michigan,...

The lumber boom of the second half of the 19th Century in the Great Lakes Region was fueld by the demand for more lumber due to the fast growth in the United States after the Civil War. This included the completion of the Transcontinental Railroad and the opening of places like the Great Plains for new settlement.  To meet this growing demand, new technology was introduced and perfected to aid in...

In the post-Civil War era there was great growth in the United States. The Transcontinental railroad was completed linking the Pacific Coast with the East and opening the Great Plains and the West to settlement. Industrialization led to increased wealth and an influx of immigration to the country. All of this meant that cities, towns, and farms all grew. This growth demanded more lumber.  The lumb...

Climate change is not new. The Great Lakes experienced a change to the climate after the 19th century lumber industry resulting in wildfires and other significant events. This episode covers how this happened and how it was able to be reversed over time. The 19th century lumber industry in the Great Lakes region was an economic boom that created wealth and encouraged settlement and the development...

In this episode I conclude the miniseries on Logging in the Northeast by visiting Pennsylvania and exploring it's lumber history. During the mid-1800s, Pennsylvania led the nation in white pine lumber production until it was eclipsed by Michigan.  Pennsylvania's lumber industry was dominated by two major river systems, the Susquehanna River flowing to the Atlantic Ocean, and the Alleghen...

Part 2 of my "Logging in the Northeast" miniseries has me exploring the forest history of the Adirondack Mountains in New York state. New York's Adirondack Mountains is the largest state park in the United States, protecting 6,000 square miles of land. Created in 1892, it is larger than many National Parks. It is a unique public-private partnership where many people live in numerous...

Long before the lumber industry made it to the Great Lakes region, logging was an important industry along the Atlantic Coast and specifically in the Northeast of what became the United States. The first region to be impacted by this boom was Maine.  Maine, at the time a part of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, and later the state of Massachusetts until its own statehood in 1820, was one of the first...

On this week's episode of North Country History with Rob Burg, I am joined by Bill Jamerson , an award winning documentary filmmaker turned author and performer, to discuss the life and experiences of CCC Boy Michael Rataj. Mike came from poverty in Detroit and came of age in the wilderness of Michigan's Upper Peninsula, where the CCC changed his life. Both Bill and I knew Mike and heard...