Step Back in Time: How a lumber company inspired a name change for Bagley
This article is from the late Bill Granlund, an Otsego County historian and former high school principal.
GAYLORD — The community of Bagley, located in section 21, had a name change to Salling in the 1890s. It was reported that Bagley was named after an early governor of Michigan and Salling derived its name from the lumber company which ran a local logging operation there.
Bagley/Salling was located in the general area of Wah Wah Soo and Point Comfort on the east side of Otsego Lake. The village encompassed the area from the present Marsh Ridge golf course to the northeast corner of the lake. The town consisted of rows of clapboard houses and tar-paper shacks.
It was a sea of stumps and consisted of mills for sawing and planing lumber; with the Michigan Central railroad spur lines connecting the various logging operations. The ethnic makeup of the village included English, Irish, Danish, Dutch, Polish and French Canadians who had immigrated from Canada to Michigan and followed the lumber industry as the mills moved further north.
The Bagley Lumber Company operated a sawmill at the site of Geigler Cottages. The sawdust pile on the shore has since washed into the lake giving its north end a spongy black bottom. In February the railroad laid tracks on the frozen lake. Snow was then scraped by teams of horses; then gang plows, set two feet apart, cut the ice to a depth of about eight inches.
Men then spudded blocks of ice loose and chains pulled it out of the water. It was then loaded onto railroad cars which transported the ice for storage until needed during the summer months. A short newspaper account related the following on the ice harvest from 1906: “The M.C.R.R. got through cutting ice at Otsego Lake Friday last. Close to 5,000 carloads were taken from there this season.”
Prominent early landmarks of the village were the schoolhouse which was located on the corner of what is now Old 27 South and West Otsego Lake Drive. Boyer’s sawmill stood on the edge of Otsego Lake and was used to process the logs hauled across the ice on large sleighs. Jensen’s log planing mill was north of the sawmill. The village of Salling disappeared as the trees were logged off and by 1915 had vanished.
It was my privilege to be acquainted with Mr. Clarence Cross, an early resident of Salling. I encouraged him to write his memories of this early village in our county. Clarence did a fine job of completing a picture of his village and its activities.
This article originally appeared on The Petoskey News-Review: Step Back in Time: How a lumber company inspired a name change for Bagley
