What is the history of Bear Lake, Michigan?
The Google ad leading here says “Bear Lake Mich”. I know the beginning of that. My grandfather’s cousin who grew up there as it was built of nothing says, in a family biography, that Mrs. Russel Smith was one of the first white women that ever stepped foot on the bank of Bear Lake.”Because I jumped out of the wagon first. We lived in the eastern United States . The Michigan pine craze struck us the same as it did hundreds of others. There were 3 families of us and we were all young. We each had one or two small children. We came by wagon to New Haven, boat to Manistee. Then we found out there was no road whatso ever to Bear Lake where we had previously taken up government claims.There was a government blazed trail the distance, nineteen miles, and that was all. We engaged a man and a team of horses to bring us here to Bear Lake. On the following May morning we set out, all loaded down with our sea chests, bags of food, and a few tools. We soon passed the pitch-smelling lumbering town.
Bear Lake grew as a typical lumber boom town during the late 1800s. The first settlers arrived around 1863, primarily in search of free land, after President Lincoln signed the Homestead Act in 1862. The settlers found the land full of virgin forest of white pine and hardwoods. Homesteaders were forced to cut and burn the trees in order to have land to farm. In 1867, one of the first homesteaders, Russell Smith, platted out the original village of Bear Lake, offering free land to any person who would open a saw mill there. Within a few years, lumber became big business in Bear Lake. The boom hit soon after 1873, when brothers George W. and David H. Hopkins, purchased the land in the village, and proceeded to build a large sawmill, a brickyard, a gristmill, a store, and the first and only railroad to serve the village. The railroad stretched from Bear Lake west to the Lake Michigan shore at Pierport and west nearly as far as Kaleva, MichiganKaleva. The village of Bear Lake was incorpora
