One of the buildings in the photo on this postcard of Manistique, Michigan, was the birthplace of Louise. One day when she was about seven, she and her older brother Herman were in their back yard poking sticks into some burning trash when her dress caught fire. Her parents, who happened to be in a funeral procession that passed by the house, saw Louise running down the street ablaze, which Herman managed to put out by rolling her on the ground. Her father and mother stopped the procession to help and found Louise’s left leg badly burned. Not able to get adequate medical help in Manistique, they sent her to the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota, where the doctors told them that, due to her burn and fragile health, Louise probably would not live to adulthood. Ironically, shortly after Louise came home to Manistique after six long months of recuperation, her brother Herman contracted a cold that quickly became pneumonia and he died. Louise largely recovered from her injury but her knee stiffened up in her later years. She used crutches from then until she was almost sixty, at which time she decided to abandon the crutches and learn to walk without them. She never resorted to them again, though she did use a walker late in life.
    Tom traveled to Manistique on July 30, 2003, and took a picture of the same location looking down River Street. (To see the photo he took, double click the image; to restore the original historical shot, click it again.) Cedar Street, right of the photo, met River at an angle that was eliminated when Manistique built the new school. Note the gazebo and small fountain in the old photo: this was evidently a somewhat featured corner in the town. At the left in both photos, the photographer’s building, where the oldest photo in this collection was probably taken, was owned by a man named Brault; the painted sign for the studio still is visible on the north side of the building beyond the photo. Brault’s son turned the place into a bowling alley and then for a while it was a small grocery where people went for treats and sundries; in 2003 it stood empty. The large clapboard building to the right was first the Chicago Lumber Company and then the C & L Hardware store; on the third floor was the Mason’s Hall. The next building visible in the photo was the city hall. The street ends at the river; the building in the old photo was probably one of innumerable mills built along the Manistique River; the building in the current photo is a lumber store. Much of the town to the left in this photo burned in the early 1900s, so most of the wooden structures have long since given way to brick; this stretch of road, a couple of blocks from the river, saw more construction and prospered after the fire.
    At its heyday, Manistique was home to five large mills and a handle company and it had a population of 20,000. The railroad wasn't completed up the coast until 1881. The logging was done further up the Manisitique River in the winter time so the logs could be dragged across the snow and ice. In spring the logs were floated down the river to the town where it was milled. The mills dumped the sawdust into the Lake Michigan where much of it remains to this day, still unrotted in the cold fresh water. The finished lumber was shipped, first by cargo ship across the Great Lakes and later by rail, to towns across the Midwest, where it helped supply the huge demand during the building boom America experienced at the end of the 1800s.
   Tom got this information from an older gentlemen who had been in town since around 1950 and from a very helpful lady at the historical museum.