History of the Thumb: An America250MI Project
The History of the Thumb project was created to highlight the people, places, and events that have shaped Michigan’s Thumb region. Through a combination of outdoor exhibit panels, a traveling display, and an interactive online experience, this initiative brings local history to a wider audience while contributing to the statewide commemoration of America250MI.
The History of Michigan's Thumb
A brief historical overview of the emergence and impact of pioneers in the region between Fort Gratiot and Saginaw Bay
VIGNETTE 1
The Original Occupants of the Thumb
How Far Have We Come in 250 Years? As America marks 250 years since the Declaration of Independence, nations around the world still look to us. Some seek to emulate our system of self-governance. Others would tear it down.
Michigan's Thumb was not always seen as a place worth fighting for. Michigan's own Governor Lewis Cass, after surveys of the region, wrote dismissively that "the country in the angle between Fort Gratiot and Saginaw Bay can never be of any importance."
They were wrong. The Thumb played a quiet but real role in America's ongoing democratic story. People came drawn by the promise that here, ordinary people could hold office, cast votes, and shape the place they called home.
VIGNETTE 2
The Original Occupants of the Thumb
Since time immemorial, Michigan and surrounding regions were home to successive cultures of native peoples — from early Paleolithic hunters to mound-builders, to the Fox, Sauk, and Wendat nations. Their presence shaped the land in ways still visible today. By the time Europeans arrived, three peoples predominated in Michigan's Thumb: the Ojibway, the Odawa, and the Potawatomi. They called themselves the Anishnabeg — the First Peoples — shared Algonquian languages, and had formed a powerful political and military alliance known as the Three Fires Confederation. In the 17th century, the Iroquois — backed by the British — pushed the Anishnabeg westward. With French support, the Anishnabeg returned and pushed the Iroquois back to New York. These Beaver Wars left the region depopulated for decades and deepened the stress on indigenous peoples of the area. Their influence on this land endures. The ancient rock carvings at the Sanilac Petroglyphs — the only known prehistoric carvings in Michigan — are estimated to be between 300 and 1,400 years old. Carved by various peoples over centuries, they depict cultural teachings, stories, and symbols still studied today.
VIGNETTE 3
Indian Removal Act: The Trail of Tears Reaches the Thumb
Treaties in 1807 and 1819 ceded much of Michigan's lower peninsula, including the entire Thumb region, to the United States. Native leaders including Ishdonquit — known to settlers as Indian Dave — gathered on the shore of the Saginaw River to negotiate with General Lewis Cass and federal officials. They were unsuccessful. When Congress forced complete removal in 1830, many resisted. Some hid in the marshes and bogs of the Cass River basin. Others fled to Canada where the political climate was different. The rest were forced westward to Kansas and Oklahoma along the infamous Trail of Tears. Some waited, then quietly returned. Indian Dave remained an important cultural figure in Tuscola County, preserving native stories and traditions. He even helped protect key court records during that county's courthouse relocation dispute — transporting them by canoe to Caro to keep them safe. Even today, descendants of the original peoples continue to seek recognition and fair treatment.
VIGNETTE 4
Canadian Rebels Discover Government by the People
In 1837, reformers in Upper and Lower Canada rose in armed rebellion. They resented British rule, forced membership in the Church of England, and a government they considered hopelessly corrupt. The rebellion — today called the Patriot War — was put down by British troops and Canadian volunteers. Some rebels were executed for treason. Others escaped across the border into Michigan, settling in St. Clair and Sanilac Counties. Here they found something they had fought and failed to achieve at home: government by the people. Among them was Ai Beard, a sawmill operator from Long Point, Ontario, imprisoned during the rebellion. Released when charges could not be proven, he and his son John fled to St. Clair County, where they already owned a sawmill in Clyde Township. John eventually acquired 7,000 acres of land, became a leading township politician, held many offices, and organized the Clyde Township Gravel and Plank Road — helping connect communities across the Thumb before municipal roads were common.
VIGNETTE 5
Large Game Draws the First Hunters
IIn 1838, Oliver Hazzard Perry of Cleveland made the first of several hunting expeditions into Michigan's Thumb. He kept detailed journals. Near the forks of the Black River, he wrote that Chippewa peoples from Canada hunted these grounds seasonally every fall, their wigwams scattered through the forest. A Saginaw hunter named Peter-non-e-quit killed two elk in a single day near his camp. Perry described a landscape almost beyond imagination today — thousands of acres of cranberry marsh, great numbers of elk antlers hung in native camps, bears within two rods of his fire at night, and the Great Indian Trail of the Saginaws running four miles to the west. Native peoples went every summer, he noted, to harvest cranberries by birch bark canoe and sell them at the mouth of the Black River for a dollar a bushel. His journals remain among the earliest detailed written records of life in the Thumb before permanent settlement — a world that would be transformed within a generation.
VIGNETTE 6
How They Built Their Log Cabins
While Mom and Kids Slept in the Wagon For new settlers, the first order of business was shelter. While the family slept in the wagon, neighbors gathered from near and far for a cabin raising. Trees were felled, notched, and stacked log by log. Gaps were filled with wooden chinks and sealed with clay mortar. Floors were split logs, flat side up. Roofs were hand-cut pine shakes held down by weight poles. The fireplace was built of stacked logs lined with stone or earth, topped by a clay-plastered chimney of split sticks — called a "cob and clay" chimney. The door opened with a buckskin latch string pulled through from outside. To lock it, you simply pulled the string in. One large room served as kitchen, bedroom, parlor, and arsenal. Dried pumpkin rings and flitches of bacon hung from the rafters. The family lived there, and the guest and wayfarer were always made welcome.
VIGNETTE 7
John Jones: When the Thumb Was Wild
One of the first non-native people to venture into the Thumb's interior and record it was John Jones of Wales. Arriving in Detroit in 1835, he learned the fur trade, then followed native hunters into the cranberry marshes south of what would become Sandusky. He trapped mink, otter, lynx, wildcat, and deer, backpacking his furs to Port Huron each spring and taking his pay in gold — paper money was not trusted. He learned birch bark craft and hide-tanning from native companions. He once spent a night in a hollow log to avoid the dark forest, and crawled out at dawn to find a bear emerging from the other end. Governor Lewis Cass had declared this land could "never be of any importance." John Jones spent the rest of his life proving otherwise. In 1862, at age 58, he enlisted at Port Sanilac in the 22nd Michigan Infantry, survived the carnage at Chickamauga, attained the rank of Sergeant, and was mustered out in Nashville in 1865. He later planted a ten-acre apple orchard, became a licensed surveyor, and served as Supervisor of Washington Township.
VIGNETTE 8
Cheap Land Brings Speculators, Preemptors, and Squatters
Sometimes a bold individual would quietly move onto a piece of federally owned frontier land and hope no one would notice. A few made a career of living free this way — always ready to vanish at a moment's notice if they were found out. More formally, preemption laws allowed any person, citizen or not, to claim government land for less than $2 per acre. They signed a document declaring their intent to become citizens and had one year to produce the money. Speculation was rampant — and illegal. Land lookers working for wealthy Eastern investors would preempt a tract, log it, and sell the claim. Some of those who profited most from Michigan's land boom never set foot in the state. For those who stayed, early financing was equally precarious. Unregulated wildcat banks failed regularly. A handshake land contract — owner as the bank — was often the only option. These arrangements were called "graduations" because the buyer repaid in regular increments. Repossessions were common. Oliver Hazzard Perry once came across an abandoned, disintegrating cabin deep in a Tuscola County forest and assumed it to be another failed graduation.
VIGNETTE 9
A Heated Courthouse Debate
Democracy Is Not Always Swift For twenty years, citizens of Sanilac County argued over where to place the county seat. The same fight was playing out simultaneously in Tuscola and Huron Counties. In each case it took years — and real political will — to resolve. Farmers in remote western townships wanted a central location. But the geographic center of each county sat squarely in swampland. In Tuscola County, the county seat briefly landed at a harbor known as "Moonshine" before Caro was finally chosen in 1866. In Huron County, the original courthouse burned to the ground in 1865 before Bad Axe was ultimately settled upon. In Sanilac County, Croswell businessman Wildman Mills offered to fund a new courthouse — provided the new town be named after his birthplace, Sandusky, Ohio. The offer was accepted and the town was erected in 1879. The Huckins Schoolhouse, now on the grounds of the Sanilac County Historic Village and Museum, served as the venue for those original debates. Today Sandusky, Michigan is a thriving city.
VIGNETTE 10
The Steamboat Era
Port Sanilac Comes Alive In 1848, Uri Raymond opened a general store at Port Sanilac, built on log cribs so close to the water's edge that heavy seas ran beneath the floorboards. His inventory was spare: salt pork, flour, molasses, tea, tobacco, axes, gunpowder, and bolts of cloth. Most transactions were not made in cash — settlers traded hemlock bark, split pine shingles, cedar posts, and animal hides in exchange for goods on account. By 1851, the first permanent dock was built at Lexington, and two sidewheel steamers — the Pearl and the Ruby — began carrying freight and passengers between Thumb port towns and Detroit. Both were 118 feet in length. For sixty years, these seasonal lake routes were the region's lifeline. When the lakes froze, commerce ceased entirely. When the first boat of spring arrived, people rejoiced. Port Sanilac's dock, store, boat-building yards, and nearby sawmills gave work to several hundred men at their peak. The most popular boat built locally was the single-masted Mackinaw, favored by commercial fishermen throughout the region.
VIGNETTE 12
The Great Fire: Resilience in the Face of Annihilation
Michigan's Thumb was shaped by two catastrophic fires a decade apart. On October 8, 1871, after a summer-long drought, fires swept across the Great Lakes region simultaneously — the Great Chicago Fire, the Peshtigo Fire in Wisconsin, and equally devastating fires along Michigan's west coast. The flames then crossed the state to Lake Huron. Saginaw, Forestville, White Rock, Huron City, and Harbor Beach were among the towns devastated. The severity was a direct result of the logging industry's practice of leaving tree tops and branches — called "slash" — behind after cutting, creating vast fields of dry kindling. Ten years later, in the fall of 1881, the worst fire the state has ever seen ripped through the Thumb. An unusually strong wind rose from the southwest. One by one the brush fires settlers used for clearing land merged into a single cataclysmic inferno. Blinding smoke darkened the sky before noon. Families fled in wagons toward the lakeshore. Others climbed into their wells, holding water-soaked blankets overhead. One family with 13 children asphyxiated when the fire consumed the oxygen around the well they hid in. Boulders exploded from the heat. Flaming tornadoes lifted into the air and landed unpredictably. Some farms were spared entirely while entire towns — Deckerville, Richmondville — were destroyed within minutes. Those who reached Lake Huron found acid smoke burning their eyes and skin. Through the haze, survivors glimpsed bears and wolves standing in the shallows beside them, fleeing the same fire. Sailors on a ship at Forestville recorded the heat was nearly unbearable seven miles offshore. Hundreds were killed and tens of thousands left homeless overnight. Clara Barton's newly formed Red Cross mounted its first-ever disaster relief effort here. Out of the ash, the Thumb's great farming era was born.
VIGNETTE 12A
Sanilac County Answers the Call
The Thumb and the Civil War On April 12, 1861, Confederate forces opened fire on Fort Sumter. The Civil War had begun. President Lincoln called for volunteers, and Sanilac County responded immediately. A local company formed under the name the Sanilac Wolverines, soon renamed the Sanilac Pioneers, and ultimately mustered into service as Company D of the Michigan 10th Infantry under Captain Israel Huckins at Lexington. Its ranks were drawn largely from the county's own businessmen and prominent citizens. The regiment served with distinction through years of hard campaigning. Of 1,788 men, 299 did not come home. Among the fallen was Captain H.H. Nimms, who had succeeded Huckins after three years of service. Many Sanilac men served in other regiments as well — the 8th, 14th, 24th, and 27th Michigan Infantry, and a Sanilac cavalry company in the 6th Michigan Cavalry. John Jones of Washington Township fought at Chickamauga. In every way, Sanilac County acquitted itself with honor.
VIGNETTE 12B
Bless Their Souls": The Women of Sanilac County at War
While Sanilac men fought in Virginia, Georgia, and Tennessee, the women at home organized with equal determination. A Soldiers' Relief Society formed at Lexington. A Soldiers' Aid Society formed at Port Sanilac. Both worked tirelessly — sending boxes of clothing, blankets, bandages, dried fruit, newspapers, and comfort items to field hospitals and camps across the front. A soldier writing from a hospital in West Virginia under General Rosecrans captured what their effort meant. After weeks of fever had taken him from duty to a hospital cot, he wrote to a friend in Sanilac County: "I was removed to another ward and supplied with quilts, coverlets, feather pillows, sheets and pillow slips by their fair hands, and my head resting upon the soft, soothing pillow — I could not help it — my eyes closed and I thanked God that our country has such women." The verdict for all who served from Sanilac, in the field and at home, was the same: courage without reservation.
VIGNETTE 13
Built in the Wrong Place, Yet Still Standing
The Pointe Aux Barques Lighthouse and Catherine Shook A dangerous reef extended two miles into Lake Huron off the Thumb's northeastern shore, a prominent hazard to every large vessel passing north or south. The government ordered a lighthouse built. Poor communication between officials and the builder resulted in the light being constructed nearly ten miles south of the intended location at Pointe Aux Barques. It has operated from that wrong spot for over 170 years. In 1849, keeper Peter Shook drowned during a resupply run. His wife Catherine took over — becoming the first female lighthouse keeper on the Great Lakes and one of the first female employees of the United States government. When a cookstove fire destroyed the keeper's house that same year, inspectors arrived two days later to find Catherine and her children living in a lean-to beside the tower. She was formally exonerated. The stress eventually led her to resign in 1851. In 1863, Andrew Shaw began a 32-year career as lightkeeper. During the Great Thumb Fire of 1881, Shaw and his Life-Saving Station crew spent two days keeping the buildings wet, saving the entire station. All supplies were rowed out into the lake to keep oil canisters safe from the flames.
VIGNETTE 14
We Must Go": The Point Aux Barques Life-Saving Station
The northeast shoreline of Lake Huron was among the most dangerous sailing waters on the Great Lakes. At least 105 recorded wrecks lie around Pointe Aux Barques. In 1876, the federal government built a Class A Life-Saving Station there with sixteen buildings, including a boathouse, repair shop, and crew quarters. On Black Friday, April 23, 1880, the scow schooner J.H. Magruder ran aground on the reef in heavy weather. Station keeper Jerome Kiah and his crew launched their surfboat into the breaking seas. About a mile from shore, a massive wave capsized them. Clinging to the overturned hull in freezing water, Kiah watched each of his men slip away one by one. He drifted ashore barely alive, murmuring: "Poor boys, they are all gone." Kiah survived and received the Gold Lifesaving Medal. The loss haunted him the rest of his life. The station's simple creed: "We must go. There is a distress flag in the rigging.
VIGNETTE 15
New Railroad Lines Reach the Thumb
Peninsulas present a unique transportation challenge, and the Thumb was low priority for railroad builders. Rough terrain, sparse population, and the region's reliance on seasonal water transport delayed rail expansion for decades. Many early rail routes followed existing Native American trade paths. The first significant railroad into the Thumb was the Saginaw, Tuscola and Huron line, built in the early 1880s — its timing shaped directly by the Great Fire of 1881, which both devastated and then accelerated the region's shift from logging to agriculture. The Port Huron and Northwestern Railroad followed, chartered in 1878, with its first line from Port Huron to Croswell opening May 12, 1879, and extensions reaching Bad Axe and Port Austin by 1882. These railroads were later absorbed by the Flint and Pere Marquette Railroad. Railroads ran year-round when the lakes could not. They carried grain, sugar beets, lumber, and passengers. The inland towns of Croswell, Applegate, and Carsonville grew along these lines as the lakeshore ports declined. The railroad did not just connect the Thumb — it reoriented it entirely.
VIGNETTE 16
The Great Storm of 1913
In November 1913, the worst storm in recorded Great Lakes history struck without adequate warning. Beginning Friday night on Lake Superior, a northwest gale combined with a warm southern front to create a winter cyclone of unprecedented force. By Sunday, waves on southern Lake Huron reached forty feet — easily capable of capsizing a several-hundred-foot freighter. Eight ships were lost on Lake Huron with no survivors. 178 sailors perished on that lake alone. Another 57 died on the other Great Lakes. In Port Sanilac, a 600-foot dock loaded with two shiploads of baled hay and apples crumpled before the waves on Sunday, November 9th. Docks at Lexington and Forestville also vanished. The steamer Regina went down between Port Sanilac and Lexington — found in 1986 by divers Gary Binieke, Wayne Brusate, and John Severance, resting upside down in 90 feet of water with a large gash across her hull. The mystery of what happened between the Regina and the Charles S. Price, whose crewmen were found wearing each other's life jackets, has never been solved. The docks were never rebuilt. Motor trucks and railroads had already taken over the carrying trade. The storm simply ended what the railroads had already begun.
VIGNETTE 17
1920: Prohibition and the Rum Runners of Lake Huron
After decades of campaigning by women's temperance organizations, Congress outlawed alcohol sales across the United States in 1920. Michigan was ahead of the curve, having gone dry two years earlier. Many had doubts the law could work. They were not entirely wrong. Illegal bars — speakeasies — appeared rapidly. Home brewing flourished. Moonshine stills multiplied. Blindness from contaminated homemade liquor was a real danger. Port Sanilac's proximity to Canada made it a natural hub for rumrunning. One notorious local operator made regular nighttime crossings of Lake Huron with no lights, painting his boat a different color after each trip to avoid detection. By the time he was done, the paint was reportedly nearly an inch thick. Customers left notes in his mailbox. Goods appeared when they returned. Illegal liquor was reportedly unloaded at the Port Sanilac Lighthouse itself, then hidden in a garage grease pit on Ridge Street — and in a hollow monument in Washington Cemetery.
VIGNETTE 18
Farm, Family, and the Cooperative Spirit
The Thumb as We Now Know It Out of the ash of the Great Fire, the Thumb's agricultural era was born. Cleared land meant farms, once the millions of stumps were removed — a labor of years. Cattle grazed between the stumps while the land was prepared. Swamps were drained through networks of tile drains, a cooperative effort among townships that remains vital to farming today. The arrival of sugar beets transformed the regional economy. In 1884, Michigan State University chemistry professor Dr. Robert Kedzie imported 1,500 pounds of French sugar beet seed — the first variety processable into granular sugar. Until then, only molasses and similar products could be made. The crop took hold and never let go. By 1964, the Thumb produced nearly 552,000 tons annually. Early in the beet era, many immigrant families from Hungary, Austria, and other Central European countries found their first employment thinning beet plants by hand on their hands and knees. The Cooperative Extension Service, the National Grange, the Michigan Milk Producers, and the Farm Bureau helped small farms stay competitive through shared equipment, improved crop strains, and collective marketing. The Thumb's identity as a farming region — beans, corn, wheat, dairy, and above all sugar beets — was built not by individuals alone, but by neighbors working together.
