Besides the logs delivered by this company to the Grand Rapids sawmills it rafted for operators below the city hot less than two billion feet during the seventeen years 1871-1888. In those same seventeen years the company delivered 650,000,000 feet of logs to the Grand Rapids mills. It continued in business until 1893. An estimate of the total yield of logs from the forests adjacent to and above Grand Rapids, which found market over the waters of Grand river, would be more than three and a half billion feet. By the year 1893 almost all the available pine timber in this immediate section of the state had been cut down and sawed up, the industry gradually declining hereabouts, and logging and sawmill activities were removed to upper Michigan.
Today there is very little pine timber left in Michigan.
Unfortunately, there was no federal or state supervision of forests in the early days and the woodsman's ax was used ruthlessly. The supply of pine timber was considered inexhaustible, but it lasted only a comparatively few years. In more recent times the people have begun to recognize the wisdom of a policy of conserving our forests and of reforesting. But it is not so easy to grow trees as it is to cut them down. Today it is estimated that there are in the state about eleven million acres of land which once grew magnificent pine trees but which are now almost worthless.