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HISTORY OF ALPENA COUNTY BY WILLIAM BOULTON IN 1876
The time came at last when the most doubtful among the disbelievers were forced to confess that farming was a successful pursuit. The honor of establishing this fact belongs to Mr. George F. Lewis, editor of the Saginawian, Saginaw City, who, during the summer of 1875, made a short tour among some of the settlements. Mr. Lewis wrote to his paper the following account of what he saw:
"Surely, says the Bay City man, who can account for the recent shipment of fanning mills to Alpena only upon the supposition that they are to be used for 'separating sand from sawdust, ' there must be some sell in any communication that follows so absurd a caption, and the average citizen of any portion of Michigan, the city of Alpena included, has as little practical knowledge of the recent astonishing agricultural developments in Alpena county as had the author of this sand and sawdusts item of the construction and legitimate purpose of a fanning mill, whenever operated.
"The enterprise which has given to the city of Alpena its prominent position as a manufacturing and commercial place, has been active for many years in making farms at points convenient to the city or to the lumber camps in the forests beyond. In nearly every instance these have proved successful and remunerative, nature thus aiding the tough job of cleaning many of the tracts which have been brought under cultivation, and the difficulty, especially near Alpena, in getting rid of the interminable top dressing of scaly limestone which is over all the earth in fragments from a square inch to a foot in size. About two miles from the Fletcher house, on the Long lake road, there is now standing on the lime-rock farm of Mr. Phelps a ten-acre field of as promising wheat as can be found in Michigan—fence-high, stout, thick, long-headed— as was not that Bay City fanningmill itemizer.
ALPENA COUNTY MICHIGAN
Page 24
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