This cache was hidden as part of the
2012 Are YOU Geocacher Enough? Road Rally
Special Thanks to Flip Flops for this cache!
Town Name: Stratford
Population: Unknown, but the Thayer Lumber Co employed 150 men plus railroad employees, store owners and their families
Reason For Becoming a Lost Town: Lumber was cut and the town moved to other logging operations once the timber ran out
Town History: Taken from "Ghost Towns of Michigan" by Larry Wakefield
"Many Michigan ghost towns have vanished almost without a trace. Nothing is left except maybe an open field with lilac bushes and shallow depressions in the ground where houses (and outhouses) once stood. Abandoned buildings go to pieces pretty fast in Michigan's damp climate. It isn't like the Far West, where whole villages may remain intact for decades, preserved in the dry desert air. For this reason, and others, Stratford, in the northeast corner of Missaukee County, is one of Michigan's most satisfactory ghost towns. Signs show you where everything was: The Depot, Main Line, Wye Track, General Store, The Hotel, Smith and Hull Grade, and so on. A larger sign between two posts at roadside on the Moorsetown Road offers a capsule history of the old village...
The Pere Marquette depot at Stratford. The left side of the depot name plate shows Rapid River as the line's destination to the northwest.
This small town was in the very northeast corner of Missaukee County. [Alan Loftis Collection]
Stratford, like Deward in Crawford County, was a company town, first, last and always. The company built the town as headquarters for its logging operations, and when timber was gone they packed it up and moved away. The timber- and the town-lasted twelve years. Along with Deward, which was logged off at about the same time, Stratford marked the end of big pine logging days in Lower Michigan
In 1897, the Thayer Lumber Company of Muskegon bought 13,400 acres of timber in the Stratford area and began logging operations on a grand scale with the latest machinery and equipment. Their timber holding at Stratford was one of the only two big stands of virgin white and red pine left in Lower Michigan; the other was at Deward
That same year, the Pere Marquette Railroad extended its Rapid City branch from Kalkaska to Stratford primarily to accommodate the Thayer Company. During the next twelve years, from 1897 to 1908, the railroad hauled an average of thirty-six carloads of logs each day, six days a week, from Stratford to the Thayer mills in Muskegon. The company employed 150 men year around and cut about 40 million board feet annually. All told, they took out an estimated 450 million board feet, and other companies along the thirty-two mile stretch of railroad, Stearns, Dempsey, Butcher and others-probably harvested as many more.
Among the later was Smith & Hull, a Traverse City firm. They built a standard-gauge logging railroad into the woods from Stratford and hauled logs to the Pere Marquette Railroad with their Shay locomotive, probably the same one of the two they would use to log off North Manitou Island in 1909.
In its efforts to preserve the memory of Stratford by marking out the sites, the Department of Conservation was helped immeasurably by Fred Hirzel of Moorestown. Fred was a young man in 1937, and he remembered Stratford very well. His father owned the general store in Moorestown, and Fred delivered beef, butter, and eggs to the logging village.
According to Hirzel, there were two men's shanties for seventy-five men each. The fifteen houses were homes for the railroad employees, company men with families, and village business owners. Two big log barns sheltered twenty teams of horses, and another building housed two hundred head of hogs.
There was a long cook shanty, a blacksmith shop, a general store, a hotel and several saloons. The railroad depot was the busiest place in town. Fred said he counted as many as nine locomotives in the village at one time. One Pere Marquette passenger train came into town every day, and for a dollar you could ride to Traverse City or Petoskey. The crew of the passenger train called it the "Klondike Branch" because the winters were so awful.
The Western Union Telegraph and Cable Company's office was at the depot. "This was the first time we knew what time it was" Hirtel said. "Before then we had to go into Lake City to get the correct time. They got it every day at eleven o'clock from Chicago.
Cache Description: Large ammo can
Notes of Interest: The child waypoint is where I believe the Klondike merged with the 2nd line. All the building mentioned are marked with signs. There are a few just across the road from the parking area. If you stand near the "Men's Housing" sign you can see the path the railroad took from the Main Line to meet with the Smith & Hull Grade. The older trees are far enough to allow the train while the younger 3rd growth trees have sprung up along the rail bed. But there is plenty enough there to make it an afternoon in this ghost town
Please use caution, this ghost town had plenty of holes and dips in the ground.
