What goes around, comes around.
Or put another way, big wheels keep on turnin'.

Big wheels were commonly used during the
logging era.

In any event, a set of “big wheels” has come “back” to Empire.

While the set wasn’t necessarily used at or near Empire, identical ones were used in the vicinity when the village “boomed” a century ago.

The big wooden wheels, once used in Michigan lumbering operations, will be displayed at the Empire Museum complex once they are refurbished. For many years they were displayed adjacent to the Con Foster Museum at Clinch Park in Traverse City as part of a lumbering exhibit.

The museum’s namesake, Conrad Foster, once worked for the Barnum and Bailey Circus. He applied his managerial skills, and perhaps a bit of showmanship, to the Grand Traverse region in the Depression-plagued 1930s.

“Con” Foster, who once served as mayor of Traverse City, spearheaded a “cleanup” of the community’s waterfront.

“He rounded up 500 volunteers, and in a day’s time, they cleaned up the waterfront,” said Steve Harold, director of the Manistee Museum. “It was the beginning of what we now know as the ‘Open Space.’”

Silas Overpack of Manistee, who manufactured the big wheels, is also credited with inventing them a few years after the Civil War.

Originally intended for local use in the woods, they made summer logging possible, according to the Lumberman’s Legacy (Manistee, 1954), and were “shipped all over the world.”

“They were made entirely by hand,” the Legacy states, “the lever principle being ingeniously used to lift and balance the load.”

Like the Model-T Ford, which was once offered only in black, the wheels also had their own trademark color.
“The painting job was always done in red,” the Legacy continued. “No other color was orthodox.”

The big wheels were exhibited at the Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893 and garnered a lot of attention. Companies located in other countries began to order them.

Most closely associated with northern Michigan, they did indeed “get around.” Some went to France for use in World War I by the 10th Engineers (a U.S. Army Forestry Regiment) and years later, one set ended up as a display in a museum exhibit in Florida’s Ocala National Forest (dozens of the wheels were shipped to that state).

One purchaser wrote, “We find the use of the high wheels very satisfactory and the cheapest way we have been able to do our logging. Our mill cut is about 300,000 feet per day and we haven’t a single donkey engine in use.”

“Year after year, strings of flat-cars loaded with the huge red wheels left Manistee daily,” a brochure prepared by the Michigan Department of Conservation stated, “destined for every state in the union where forests were being leveled with prodigious speed to provide wood for a nation growing like wildfire. In Michigan alone, some 65 different lumber companies used them.”

They continued to be built until 1920, when the last shipment left Manistee. The ten-foot horse-drawn wheels were finally giving way to trucks as the supply of wheels equaled diminishing demand.

While they proved quite useful for their intended purpose, the wheels needed to be treated with respect.

“More than one man was killed by those big wheels,” Vier Robbins was to recall years later. “If you ran over a stump with one of the wheels, the tongue would immediately swing to one side. That was the most common hazard, but there were other ones, too.”

For many years, Empire’s newly acquired big wheels were exhibited alongside David H. Day’s 0-4-0 steam logging locomotive.

The little engine, built about 140 years ago at the beginning of the big wheel era, hauled lumber from the Day sawmill at Glen Lake to the dock in Glen Haven for about 25 years.

“The locomotive had previously been used by Manistee’s John Nessen, who had a mill at Glen Lake,” Harold said. “Prior to that, it was owned by the legendary lumberman, Louis Sands.”

Already a relic when acquired by Day in 1907, it was spotted by Chicago utility magnate Samuel Insull during a visit 20 years later in July 1927. Insull expressed an interest in buying it. He was part of a party of about a dozen prominent men that included Charles G. Dawes, vice-president of the United States. They disembarked at Glen Haven, bound for Traverse City, from the steamer Manitou. That was probably the quickest way to Traverse City from Chicago at that time.

But money can’t buy anything – or perhaps Insull didn’t make a worthwhile offer.

In any event, the little locomotive remained in the hands of the Day family for a few more years, until it was no longer needed in the Great Depression of the 1930s. The family then loaned it to the Con Foster Museum for a “lumbering exhibit,” which included the set of “big wheels.”

The Enterprise took note of the old locomotive’s departure from the county – recalling that Insull had once wanted to buy it.

Following the long-term loan to the Traverse City museum, the little locomotive has traveled widely in the past 30 years or so.

“It later was sold to the Cedar Point amusement park in Ohio. Then, after ownership by Greenfield Village in Dearborn, it was acquired by the Port Huron Museum,” George Weeks wrote in Sleeping Bear, Yesterday and Today.

From the dock in Glen Haven where the little locomotive once ran, you could once see what is perhaps the Port Huron Museum’s most popular “exhibit” – the lightship Huron.

Until 1935, when the North Manitou Shoals lighthouse (often referred to locally as “the crib”) was built, the Manitou Passage was home to various lightships. The last one to be used (and lettered Manitou) was taken to Port Huron and put in service there. As the Huron, it was the last of a long line of Great Lakes lightships when finally retired.

It does seem that what goes around, comes around.