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Home > Local Features by WXPR > Hazelhurst and the Yawkey Lumber Company
Podcast: Local Features by WXPR
Episode:

Hazelhurst and the Yawkey Lumber Company
Category: Government & Organizations
Duration: 00:03:26
Publish Date: 2021-07-21 09:30:00
Description: The town of Hazelhurst, like so many others in the Northwoods, got its start through the logging industry. But unlike other Northwoods communities with origins in logging, Hazelhurst’s ties to the Yawkey Lumber Company gave it a slightly different trajectory. It was a path that shapes the community to this day. Cyrus Carpenter Yawkey was a nephew of Michigan lumbering tycoon William Clyman Yawkey and grew up in Saginaw, Michigan, where he learned the trade. In 1888, William, Cyrus, and George E. Lee acquired a sizeable tract of land around Lake Katherine and started the sawmill village of Hazelhurst. The three men organized the Yawkey and Lee Lumber Company, and immediately commenced timber cutting in the winter of 1888-1889. Cyrus Yawkey was a teetotaler and did not allow saloons or other disreputable businesses in his new village, and this set Hazelhurst apart from other logging boomtowns. However, not long after the village was founded, a large barge with a building on top of it
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