Efforts to save Alberta sawmill, pump house progressing

Jun 5, 2023

WORK CONTINUES TO preserve the former sawmill at Alberta, the site of a planned community built by Henry Ford after World War I to help provide lumber for his company. (Garrett Neese/Daily Mining Gazette)

ALBERTA — Nearly a year after community members launched a campaign to save the Alberta sawmill and pump house from demolition, those efforts are bearing fruit.

The pump house, which once also housed the greeting center for Alberta, will reopen on June 23 with an art gallery run by L’Anse's K-12 art teacher Jacqueline Rowlison. The adjacent room will have interpretive displays about the pumphouse, demonstration sawmill and Henry Ford's operations in Alberta and throughout the U.P.

The committee formed last spring after receiving word that Michigan Technological University, which operates Alberta, planned to tear down the sawmill and pump house building. The demonstration sawmill, once a centerpiece of Henry Ford's planned community at the site, had been closed to the public since the 2000s for safety reasons.

"In one year's time, we’ve gone from that environment to having something on the cusp of a two-year lease," said Wayne Abba, a member of the committee. "It's going to be a shiny little jewel up there by the highway."

Rowlison's shop will open on June 23, a day ahead of Alberta Fest.

The committee has been talking with Michigan Technological University to prepare a business plan for the sawmill, which Abba said is close to being finished.

Tech provided the committee with a condition assessment done on the building several years ago to use as a baseline. The committee has gotten people with engineering experience to take a look at the building's current condition.

"We’ve got sort of a handshake agreement with Tech that we can set up a non-profit organization and obtain a five-year lease, for example, from them and go after the resources we need to restore and preserve what we need to to get the building back open as a historical exhibit," Abba said.

Tech students are taking classes at the site and documenting its case for becoming a national landmark.

Next spring, Steve Walton's graduate students of the history of technology will visit the site to document the sawmill process and the machinery used in it.

Students in Mark Rhodes’ industrial communities course have also been collecting information to get the site listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

The committee also reached out to a Copper Country Intermediate School District teacher interested in using the sawmill for place-based education.

"They can use the idea of the industrial era, the forest products as raw materials for the cars, the idea of vertical supply chain integration that Henry Ford stood for and the social utopia experiment here and in Fordlandia in South America," Abba said. "We’ve got the only intact example of that in the whole world."

Committee members are also reaching out to retired Ford historian Bob Kreipke as well as the CEO of the Henry Ford Heritage Association, an organization focused on preserving Henry Ford's legacy.

"He's never been up here to see the northern Michigan operations," said committee member Mike DesRochers. "If we can get him up here for Alberta, we’ll try to keep him for a day and take him around to some of the other places."

In 2024, the Ford group plans to devote one of its quarterly publications to the lumber side of Ford's operations, which gets comparatively little attention, Abba said.

After being weeks away from demolition, the pump house re-opening is a big step towards demonstrating the viability of preserving that building and the sawmill, DesRochers said.

"That building will be open, and people can see some things, and it's a stepping stone that we’re hoping we can utilize to show Tech that these are the kinds of things we want to do," he said.

Today's breaking news and more in your inbox

GWINN — M-35 near Gwinn in Marquette County will be closed and detoured beginning today, as part of the Michigan ...

IRON MOUNTAIN — The Wild Rivers Invasive Species Coalition will have its annual meeting from 9 a.m. to 1:30 p.m. ...

By Daily News staffFlorence County Board of Education will meet at 5:30 p.m. today in Room 259 of Florence High ...

LANSING — Michigan's income guidelines for the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and ...