Creative History

            By 1890 the town of Pere Cheney, Michigan was home to several prosperous sawmills, a post office, a general store, a doctor’s office, a school and a bustling railroad station located along the Central Michigan line. Pere Cheney had approximately 1,500 residents all of whom had their livelihoods tied, in one way or another, to Michigan’s burgeoning lumber industry which supplied countless tons of lumber to building projects all across the United States during the last half of the nineteenth century. Established in 1874, Pere Cheney was named after the nearby sawmill of local landowner George Cheney and was settled by lumberjacks and their families who had come to northern Michigan attracted by the region’s abundant woodlands.  For a brief few years, sometime in the 1870’s and 1880’s this lumber boomtown of Pere Cheney was even the county seat of Crawford County and was a frequent stop by many travellers on the Central Michigan Railr...