By Linda Beaty
Sun contributor
This is the first in a series the Glen Arbor Sun will publish about local ghost towns.
Ghost towns — sometimes called “boomtowns,” exist throughout the world. These formerly bustling communities were often built up around a natural resource, such as gold, and were abandoned when the resource was depleted.
But while most people are aware of western ghost towns such as California’s Tombstone or Bodie, fewer people know that northern Michigan is host to some interesting ghost towns too, built not upon gold, but upon “green gold,” or the timber that made the state the nation’s leading lumber producer during the second half of the 19th century.
By 1850, the federal government was in a predicament. Rich in vast tracts of land, there was little cash reserve to pay debts. It sought to alleviate the situation through the “Swamp Land Act,” which ceded unusable land due to swamps — even marshes or intermittent ponds — to state governments, allowing them to sell the land to speculators who wanted to establish commerce, for as little as $0.75 to $1.50 per acre.
So the timber rush began. Lumber barons who had already seen the forests depleted in eastern states such as Maine, began to battle for Michigan’s land. What property could not be purchased legally was acquired through more nefarious means. The Homestead Act of 1862, signed by Abraham Lincoln, allowed any homesteader 21 years of age and not in trouble with the government, to lay claim to 160 acres of land, as long as he developed the property. And the lumber barons were not above hiring bogus homesteaders to claim their plot and stay until the timber on it was cut.
All of this wooding excitement revolved primarily upon Michigan’s white pine, which was used to build houses, barns, fences, buggies and more. Nicknamed “cork,” it was an ideal source of lumber because it grew straight and tall, with the oldest specimens 200-300 years of age, 200 feet tall and up to 8 feet in diameter. When felled, the pine logs were buoyant, making them easy to float down the river to the sawmill, and they yielded more usable lumber per acre than other soft woods. A $1.50 purchase of land could bring in more than $75 of lumber.
Numerous logging settlements built up in Michigan during the mid-1800s, with “shanty boys” (lumberjacks) hired to work camps for $1.50 to $2 pay for a 14-hour day. Much of the labor was done during the winter because the logs were easily hauled to the banks of the frozen rivers by horse-drawn sleds, where they were held until the spring thaw, then floated down river to retention ponds, and lifted up to sawmills for processing. For many, the job, which entailed backbreaking work and nights in a bunkhouse strewn with other sweaty, lice-infested men, was a means to earn enough money to establish a farm of their own.
Aral was a logging settlement with a colorful history, largely because it witnessed one of the area’s few pioneer shootouts. Aral is located four miles south of Empire at the end of Esch Road, where Otter Creek empties into Lake Michigan. Today it’s one of the most popular swimming beaches in the Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore, and offers few signs of its colorful past, when Aral was a thriving wooding town.
Aral’s history dates to 1853, when a surveyor named Orange Risdon from Saline, Mich., was assigned to perform federal surveys in northern Michigan, which were required by the government prior to releasing land for individual purchase. Apparently he liked what he saw of the mouth of Otter Creek, because soon after the survey was completed, he and his wife Sally purchased 122 acres there.
The acreage was sold a little over a decade later to Robert F. Bancroft, who served in the Civil War as a photographer. Bancroft had little in mind except a quiet place to live; he cleared 20 acres of his new land, built a log cabin on it, and surrounded the cabin with black locust trees and an apple orchard.
But lumber speculators soon changed all that. As forests near Grand Haven and Muskegon were nearing the end of harvesting, they went looking for other stands of white pine, and found several inland from Otter Lake. Soon Dr. Arthur O’Leary, an Irishman from Wisconsin with little experience in the lumber business, bought large tracts of this forest and began planning his operation. By 1881, the creek had been dammed to create a millpond in front of a newly built two-story sawmill, where the logs could be lifted up to be cut. A boarding house for the lumberjacks and horse barns for the camp horses had been erected and a dock for loading the wood onto ships was built on Bancroft’s property on Lake Michigan just north of Otter Creek. The milling operation commenced that year.
Aral grew larger as a result of the booming lumber business, and by 1883, a post office was built, and the community had to decide upon a town name. The logical choice was “Otter Creek,” as it was known to its inhabitants, but both this name as well as “Bancroft,” after Aral’s first resident, had already been given to other communities in Michigan. A sawmill worker suggested the name “Aral” after the large and salty Aral Sea in Central Asia, and the name stuck, although locals still called their community Otter Creek. Frank Thurber, a local physician and township treasurer, was appointed the first postmaster.
By 1886, the town boasted a population of about 200, and in addition to the post office, had a second boarding house, a schoolhouse, a church which also served as a meeting hall, and a general store. O’Leary had leased the mill to Charles T. Wright, an experienced lumberman from Wisconsin. As the pine stands were depleted, Wright, who had commuted for a time between Wisconsin and Michigan but now owned a house across from Robert Bancroft, kept the mill busy with processing hardwoods, turning out lumber used for flooring, furniture, railroad ties, and fence posts.
Wright had a head for business, but he also had a bad temper and was known to throw a few punches in the heat of an argument. In 1889, the taxes on the Aral sawmill had escalated to a rate that he considered unreasonable, so he refused to pay his taxes for that year. County sheriff A.B. Case responded by requesting treasurer Dr. Thurber to issue a writ of attachment to apply to the mill yard’s logs, an action which would shut down Wright’s operation and force him to pay his taxes.
On August 10, 1889, deputy sheriff Neil Marshall was sent to Aral to implement the writ. Wright, who had been alerted to the arrival of the deputy, took his rifle to the creek and instructed his crew to begin rolling logs into the water. When Marshall arrived, a confrontation ensued but Wright’s men were directed by their boss to keep working, so Marshall went to the hotel for dinner and to seek out Dr. Thurber’s assistance. The two men returned about 2:30 pm, and again, Wright was alerted of the visitors, but this time was waiting with gun in hand when they arrived. After a brief struggle between Wright and Marshall, Wright fired the rifle, killing Marshall instantly.
Then Thurber tried to wrestle the rifle from Wright and succeeded, only to see Wright pull a revolver from his pocket. Thurber was shot once in the head, and again in the chest, and he, too, died. The mill continued to operate for a short while after the double murder, but soon Wright became anxious and shut it down, paying the men for their work, and hiding in the woods.
By evening, local prosecuting attorney George Covell had learned by wire of the murders, and was headed from Frankfort to Aral by steamer, along with a posse of men and the newspaper editor and photographer. A large, angry crowd had gathered around the mill by that time, and when the posse arrived, many helped to search for Wright — to no avail. But it was suspected that one person knew about his whereabouts — Lahala, an Indian employee. The crowd tied a rope around Lahala’s neck and attached the other end over the branch of a pine tree, threatening to hang him if he didn’t reveal what he knew. After several lifts from the ground, Lahala spoke. Wright was captured and convicted of two counts of murder and sentenced to life imprisonment at Jackson, Mich.
The mill continued running with a new operator, and in 1899, burned down, a suspected arson. And by 1904, the entire community, with the exception of the Bancroft family, had left, and Aral’s post office had closed. A new group arrived in Aral in 1908 and briefly revived the town; this was a communal, celibate religious group called the Israelite House of David, known for their long beards, their red-suited band, which played on their schooner named The Rising Sun, and their baseball team, which was reputed to be the best in the area. The group rebuilt the sawmill, and for the next three years of the declining lumber era, harvested the remaining forest. When the timber was gone, so was the House of David, leaving only the Bancrofts in Aral, until they too left in 1922.
As for Wright? He served only 10 years of time, working as a bookkeeper in the prison’s office. For reasons unknown, his sentence was commuted by Michigan Governor Hazen S. Pingree, and he returned to Aral for his former wife, who had since divorced him and remarried. There are several versions as to how he won her back, but that is another story.
Local writer Anne-Marie Oomen’s 1998 play “Aral: A Folk Opera” recreates the Charles Wright double murder and the waning days of Aral’s lumber boom. Read about “Aral: A Folk Opera” in our online archives at GlenArborSun.com. The following books also recount the story of Aral: Ghost Towns of Michigan Volume I by Larry Wakefield; Ghost Towns, a publication of Friends of Sleeping Bear Dunes; 100 Years in Leelanau, by Edmund M. Littell, and The Logging Era: Period of Graft and Exploitation, by Dave Warner.
