In Search of Traverse City Wilderness…

The Masonic Lodge in 1890 at the corner of Front and Union Street shows a similar sight (GT Heritage Center).

By: Richard Fidler

 

The photograph is damaged and faded: looking south on Union Street , 1860.  Slender trees, their lower branches lopped off, await the certainty of their execution.  The ground lies bare and abused from the footfalls of men and their beasts: a suggestion of juniper in the sand amid the hacked branches of white pine.  The picture is a flawed record of Traverse City with its scratches and blemishes, but it is interesting nonetheless because it describes a place and a time before European settlement.  Before 1830 the land was trees:  a few marshes, a few treeless dunes scattered here and there, to be sure, but the forest ruled supreme in Northern Michigan .  What was this wilderness that covered Traverse City -what kinds of trees made it up?  Can we still find vestiges of it, even after a hundred seventy-five years of urbanization?  Are there untouched places not so far away that mirror the city's former self?

 

In 1850 chief surveyor Lucius Lyon was sent to the Traverse City area to establish section lines within the townships that had been drawn up some eleven years previously.  Surveyors did not simply draw the lines and move on; they also made notes upon the landforms, the soil type, and the vegetation as well as human activities such as logging.  Here is a passage he wrote concerning a line made from what is now the Eighth Street bridge due north to the bay: "Land nearly level, plain, sandy soil, poor, second-rate, White and Yellow (Red) Pine, White and Red Oak".  This area of Traverse City -roughly from Oak Street (how appropriately named!) east to the airport and beyond-supported pines and oaks-"second-rate"-for agriculture and forestry. 

 

For those purposes, it has changed little since Lyon 's day.

 

Compare Lyon's description of the downtown area to this description of wilderness that begins on US31S approximately opposite the present Meijer's store north to Seventh Street : " Cedar Swamp .  Intersect mill pond (at Kid's Creek?), Cedar/Spruce/Hemlock".  Clearly he was walking through  wetlands, only traces of which can be observed now at the intersection of West Silver Lake Road and Division Street .  (Incidentally, " Division Street " was likely so named because it runs along a section line in Lyon 's survey.)  Farther west, in the Willow Hill district along Monroe and Madison Streets, beeches, sugar maples, and hemlock appear in the notebook.  Vestiges of that forest still persist in the Commons and at the Willow Hill school campus.

The grove of trees on NMC's campus may be over one hundred-fift years old.

Besides looking at old photographs and studying surveyor's records, there is an easier, more enjoyable way to explore the wilderness that was Traverse City : take a walk and search out relic trees of the past.  In this quest it would make no sense to walk the Central neighborhood since we know that early city leaders planted sugar maples in abundance along Sixth, Seventh, Eighth Streets and beyond.  Sugar maples live in Northern Michigan and we love them for their shade, their color in the fall, and for maple syrup.  But there is no reason to think they grow naturally along our city streets.  They do not live forever; one hundred-thirty years is a reasonable life span for trees forced to cope with the combined assaults of auto exhaust and nearby pavement.  In fact, we can still see the old, tired trees planted in the middle of the nineteenth century, their branches pointed stiffly to the sky, awaiting their end at the hands of city workers.  No, sugar maples were never the dominant tree of the Traverse City .

 

To get a glimpse of really old trees you need to look around people's houses, not in parks, beaches, or arboretums.  Walking south from the bay shore along Union or Pine Street or along Washington and Webster Streets, you find them in back yards, occasionally in the front: white and black oaks, their tattered canopies extending nearly as far laterally as vertically.  Oaks are at the edge of their range in Traverse City .  As you drive north, they become less common; black oaks drop out first, followed by whites soon after you cross the bridge.  Beyond Sault Ste. Marie they have been replaced by hardier species better able to tolerate weeks of subzero temperatures in the winter.  Due to such poor growing conditions, an oak in Traverse City possesses seniority by virtue of its size alone.

 

A black oak at Fifteenth and Pine has a girth of nearly fourteen feet, its diameter exceeding four feet. A study done in Chicago gives us a clue as to how old it is.  Under growth conditions appropriate to that site, a red oak (similar to a black oak) with a stem exceeding four feet would be more than 300 years old. It is notoriously difficult to affix an age to trees that spend part of their lives under the artificial conditions of a residential neighborhood.  That said, it could have been a sapling when Father Marquette explored northern Michigan in the latter half of the 17^th century!.  The white oak on Washington Street , famed locally as an Indian trail-marking tree, has a diameter of over three feet.  Using the above formula relating size and age, its age can be determined; it may be as old as two hundred fifty years.  There is no way of telling exactly when the young branch was bent and held down to create the zigzag Mackinac Trail road sign, though the date was likely before European settlement. Clearly this oak has long been a part of the Traverse City wilderness.

 

Diligence is required to find pre-settlement white pines because so many were cut down for lumber and because they were not so desirable as backyard shade trees.  The Front Street campus of Northwestern Michigan College supports a grove of old trees, largely white pine with a few red pine mixed in.  The largest of them has a diameter of about two feet six inches.  A smaller tree in upstate New York was over one hundred-fifty years old when it was cut.  Consequently, considering the harshness of our climate, competition from nearby trees, and the relative fertility of the soil, it is a fair estimate to say this tree was living before 1850.  It, and its nearby companions, represents the ‘forest primeval' in which local Odawa people dwelled before Europeans set foot here.  Other large white pines-perhaps as old--may be found near Central grade school.

 

Besides the old-growth pines and oaks, there are the magnificent beeches of Monroe Street , the Commons, and Willow Hill School .  They mark a change in soil type: the richer sandy-loam of glacial moraines replaces the ‘droughty sands' of the plains.

You may recognize beeches.  They beg to be touched; unconsciously we extend a hand to stroke the smooth, gray elephant skin bark.  Two of these trees, both located in front yards of homes, have a circumference of ten feet six inches, the diameters calculating out to more than three feet four inches.  A tree of such size is certainly older than one hundred-fifty years; an upstate New York beech stump with a diameter of only 2.1 feet was thought to be 220 years old.   Beeches, together with their shorter-lived companions, sugar maples, have long occupied a place in among Traverse area trees.

 

This photo, taken of a mission church built by Reverend Peter Dougherty in 1842, sheds light on our early landscape (GT Heritage Center).

How would Traverse City have looked prior to 1840? There would have been a narrow sandy beach with small willows and beach plum within a few tens of feet from the shore. Bearberry and horizontal juniper and common juniper would have grown to cover most of the exposed sandy ground much as it does around the Good Harbor area now in the Sleeping Bear Dunes National Park in Leelanau counties. Farther back the trees would have anchored the soil: jack, red, and white pines with oaks occasionally affording deciduous counterpoint to the monotony of these conifers. White cedar, spruce, hemlock and American elm would have populated the southwest area along Kids Creek, and aspens might have dotted the landscape here and there.There would have been no sycamores, black walnuts, catalpas, black locusts, silver maples, or tulip trees since the ranges of these species do not extend as far north as Traverse City.  At the western edge of town, in the rising hills around Traverse City , was a forest of northern hardwoods with beech and sugar maple predominating. Trees would have been large, but probably not bigger than those surviving today in scattered areas around town. It would have been a world of stark beauty full of the ‘otherness' that abounds in nature whenever humans are elements of a vaster composition and are not the center of it.This precious forest exists still but we must look harder to find it. In hidden places-- perhaps not so far from our homes-it lives still. May it persist forever!  

 

The author wishes to thank the Archives of the State of Michigan for its assistance in preparing this manuscript.

 

 

Sources

 

Barnes, Burton and Wagner, Warren H. Jr., Michigan Trees, University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor , 1981

 

Chicago Wilderness Magazine, "Telling a Tree's Age", chicagowildernessmag.org/issues/spring, 2006

 

Dickmann, Donald I. And Leefers, Larry A., The Forests of Michigan , University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor , 2003.

 

General Land Office Notes, Record group 89-74, Natural Resources 8/14/4-8, Vol.14, State Archives of Michigan, Lansing .

 

NYOGFA Forest Survey, www.championtrees.org/old growth/surveys/SelkirkShoresSP.htm

 

Old Traverse City, Gull Gallery, 3717 Jefferson St., Traverse City, MI, 2^nd edition, 1975

 

Soil Survey Grand Traverse County, U.S. Dept. of Agriculture, Soil Conservation Service, U.S. Printing Office, Washington, D.C., 1965.

 

Voss, Edward G., Michigan Flora, Cranbrook Institute of Science, Bulletin 59 and University of Michigan Herbarium, 1985.

 

Richard is a former biology teacher, artist, naturalist, student of Japanese, and a writer who constantly struggles to control the grammatical errors, abrupt transitions, inconsistencies, non sequiturs, changes in voice, and mixed metaphors that crop up into his writing like crabgrass in August.