Bay City, shown in aerial photo from 1949, was in the throes of a post-war boom as voters approved a pay-as-you-go school building program to meet a growing population, then pegged at 52,000 compared to today's approximately 36,000. Bay City Recalls its Successful Heritage as Leaders Confront Economic Seas
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Our ancestors came here to create a community for the common good and mutual prosperity. They succeeded greatly.
Now we, as inheritors of this community of prosperity and civilized compatibility, must remake the economic base, challenged as this nation is by free trade and world competition.
For it is, all agree, a new age of global economics and technological advances. Our pine tree foundations and entrepreneurial adaptation were fine for the simpler days of transition from the agricultural to the industrial ages. But what do we do now, as workers in Mexico, China, Indonesia and Balkan countries challenge our previous superiority in education, technology and work ethic?
We need to recognize that this isa special place, as one local sage calls it, not entirely tongue in cheek: "the center of the known universe." The relative truth of that statement becomes ever more apparent as we conclude this week the last of three sessions on Bay City history at the Institute for Learning in Retirement at Saginaw Valley State University. There about 50 local history scholars have been collaborating in expanding our knowledge of the heritage of this amazing community. Among the participants are several direct descendants of the city's most noted and successful citizens.
Bay City's heritage of innovation and productivity proved up to the standards of the nation's industrial cornucopia created by Henry Ford, John Deere, Eli Whitney, the Pillsburys and McCormicks of the world's most prolific and prosperous nation.
The story of Bay City is so dramatic to sometimes seem improbable. But it is true, and its importance cannot be underestimated, especially when viewed in the perspective of history and in light of present developments.
In many ways Bay City has been a magnet for world leaders, attracting the likes of Alexis de Tocqueville, John Jacob Astor, Henry Rowe Schoolcraft, James Gillespie Birney, John D. Rockefeller, Herbert H. Dow, William A. Durant, Albert Kahn, Charles Kettering and other paragons of progress.
The value of the raw products and the industrial innovation that flowed from this fertile valley and community is still being contemplated and assessed.
Timber flowed from forests and mills here to build the nation, especially Chicago after the great fire of 1871. From James McCormick's first load of pine to Buffalo in the 1840s it was known as the finest, clearest lumber produced anywhere in the world.
Henry Sage came from New York, bought Birney's farm and built the world's largest sawmill. He left a lasting tribute to the lumber industry, a magnificent library building once used as a high school.
Localshipyards were pronounced the nation's most technologically advanced by government inspectors in the 1880s and Rockefeller came to Frank Wheeler because of the high quality of his giant steel freighters.
The Sovereign brothers pioneered the ready-cut home industry and several firms, Aladdin, Lewis/Liberty and Sterling shipped thousands of homes across the nation and the world. During World World I the British built an entire town of Bay City homes for workers in war industries.
In the heyday of bicycle racing, Bay City's National Cycle Co. products were favored by the nation's fastest racers. The company was acquired by Durant as a division of Chevrolet and survives today as an auto parts producer of General Motors PowerTrain.
Capt. James Davidson converted carloads of oak to the longest of wooden cargo ships that fanned out across the lakes, bringing mountains of grain, coal and iron ore to Midwest ports from the 1870s until the turn of the century.
When the timber ran out, tugboat Capt. Ben Boutell hauled huge floating booms of logs from Canada, keeping local mills going and extending the lumber boom by a decade.
William Clements' huge cranes gouged out the Panama Canal and lifted the steel to the top of the Mackinac Bridge. Clements spent most of the fortune he made here on books and in 1922 endowed one of the most important libraries of American history, the Clements Library at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.
James E. Davidson, financier and scion of the shipbuilder, introduced business methods to baseball beginning with the Bay City Wolves and as financial vice president of the Cleveland Indians. His heroic act to "save" the Peoples Commercial Bank with an emergency deposit of $1 million as banks failed all over the nation was an epic event.
The nation's rich and famous of the 1930s flocked to Defoe for their luxury vessels, the most famed of which is no doubt the Honey Fitz, a vesselconfiscated by the government that became the Presidential yacht of five chief executives. It remains a floating historical archive in Palm Beach, Florida.
Bay City dredges and shovels clomped across Florida and California leaving irrigated fertile fields in place of deserts and were deployed by the War Department across the South Pacific building airfields to help defeat the Japanese.
The nation's industrial giants marveled at the electric welding machine industry that evolved here, building on eastern roots, a marvelous technology that could take a sheet of steel and bend and fabricate it in seconds into a car door or a refrigerator body. RWC, Inc., and Newcor are firms continuing this work.
Harry J. Defoe'sprototype destroyer escort was multiplied hundreds of times in the nation's shipyards, helping mightily to turn the tide in the Atlantic against the Nazi U-boats.
Dow poured tons of magnesium from local foundries, which had mastered the difficult art, for war materiel not obtainable in similar quantities elsewhere. American Aerospace and Bay Cast carry on the tradition of advanced metallurgy, producing components for spacecraft as well as aerospace.
Prof. Edward Stalker, head of the U-M aeronautics department, gave up his academic post to establish a local company using magnesium foundry technology developed here to build the most advanced jet engine parts.
Les Staudacher crafted the fastest racing boats in the world in a Kawkawlin church furniture factory. These incredible speed machines brought famed drivers like bandleader Guy Lombardo to his shop and dominated the Gold Cup events in Detroit for years. Staudacher's experience of crashing during a high speed test on Hubbard Lake was emulated in the opening scenes of a noted 1954 film, "Magnificent Obsession," starring Rock Hudson.
The Dow Chemical Company's legacy of innovation here persists in a successor firm, the S.C. Johnson & Son Inc., producing an array of technologically advanced plastic consumer products sold worldwide.
Gougeon Brothers have revolutionized the methods of fastening wood worldwide with their WEST SYSTEM Epoxy and PRO-SET adhesives, more areas of technological innovation to Bay City's credit. The recent private spacecraft sent into orbit went aloft with components fastened by Gougeon products.
The future of Bay City and Bay County will no doubt depend on companies like Gougeon, S.C. Johnson and Dow Corning Corp., with its blue laser diodes and nanotechnology initiatives. And other companies still just ideas in the minds of inventors and entrepreneurs.
A recent survey of 65 business and civic leaders projected high tech industrial areas as most prominent targets for growth. A community which historically was a leader in technology and innovation can rebuild its economy along those same lines, these leaders feel. (See MyBayCity.com Nov. 14, 2004 issue headlined "Free Trade." You may access the entire consultant's report on economic development strategy.)
An historical summary of the community's principal industries has been published which states as follows: "MADE IN BAY CITY" -- That is the hall mark of excellence. It is recognized wherever men employ modern methods to perform the world's tasks. It is a far cry from the original salt blocks and the frontier saw mills which formed the foundation for Bay City's industrial structure, to the scores of factories which, teeming with energy day by day, send their products to every corner of this country, and to every continent on the globe."
The fact that this was a fountainhead of progress is evident in our landmarks: St. James, the first Catholic co-educational high school in the country; the Bay City Players, oldest community theatre group in the state; Central High's band, oldest continuously operating marching band in the state; Sage Library, longest serving library building in the state; andother monuments to the enduring quality of local institutions.
The world has noticed Bay City. A Bay City Walking Dredge is on display at the Seminole State Park near Naples, Florida, noted as a "National Historic Mechanical Engineering Landmark." An Industrial Works crane is on display at the Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn. Books have been written about the dredges and ready-cut homes pioneered here. Scholars the world over gravitate to the Clements Library for serious research about the American Revolution.
As our economic developers organize for the future, we the descendants of the pioneers and the later-coming inheritors of the torch of community progress, need to recognize the importance of our heritage and the requirement that we provide a firm foundation for posterity.
Likewise we must determine how to provide meaningful employment for sons and daughters and grandchildren whom we educate, many who have made important marks in other places but whose talents are desperately needed here.
These are not easy tasks but they must be done with unity and resolve to perpetuate our heritage of prosperity and success.###
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