by 
In the heart of Michigan’s lumber era, Tawas City thrived along the Lake Huron shore. Towering pine forests fed the mills, and narrow-gauge railroads wound their way through the woods, dragging timber to the rivers and sawmills that defined the town’s fortunes. The buildings in this view — stark wooden structures, sharp against the horizon — stood as monuments to a community built on lumber. Logs floated in the mill pond, waiting to be cut, while the hum of industry shaped the rhythm of daily life.
Yet, amid the clamor of saws and locomotives, there was room for leisure. On Sundays, when the mills slowed and the railroad tracks lay quiet, the narrow-gauge trains took on a different role. Families gathered at the depot, piling into open cars not with timber but with anticipation. Excursions carried workers, wives, and children past the very forests that sustained them, offering a day’s reprieve from the grind of lumbering. It was a ritual as much as an outing, a chance to see the country that so often remained hidden behind toil.
This photograph, said to depict such a Sunday more than a century ago, preserves a rare balance of industry and community. The crowd along the tracks, the mill looming in the background, and the quiet log-strewn water all speak to an era when Michigan’s small towns were both workplaces and homes. For the people of Tawas City, the lumber trade provided their livelihood, but these excursions offered something just as enduring — a moment of shared joy in a town shaped by the forests around it.
