Rest day in the City of Cadillac
We spent a relaxing rest day in the town of Cadillac. Yes, the town is located in Michigan, but no it has nothing to do with the cars. Both the town and the car company derived their names from Antoine de la Mothe Cadillac, the guy who founded Detroit.
Cadillac started out as a lumber town next to a lake. Back then both the lake and the town were called Clam Lake, today the town is called Cadillac and the lake is called Lake Cadillac.
Other than the use of his name, Antoine de la Mothe Cadillac doesn't have a real connection to the town of Cadillac. The guy who built the town was a lumberman named George Mitchell. He was the first Mayor and his lumber mills employed a big chunk of the town's population.
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The story of lumbering in Cadillac is a familiar one. Pines and hardwoods that had been growing for centuries were cut down and no new trees were planted to take their place. After a few profitable decades the timber was gone and the lumber companies moved on to new locations. The last mill closed in the 1940s.
Ice was also a business in Cadillac from the 1870s until the 1940s. They had everything they needed - ice from the frozen Lake Cadillac, sawdust to insulate the ice from the saw mills, and a train line to transport the ice.
An innovation in the lumber business was a small train locomotive designed by Ephriam Shay, who lived near Cadillac. With a Shay locomotive, temporary tracks with tight curves and steep grades could be used to haul trees from lumber camps during the summer.
Tourism has replaced lumber as the main business in Cadillac. There are nice walking paths around the lake, water sports, biking and hiking in the summer, snowmobiling and skiing in the winter. For a small town, there are lots of good restaurants. The hotel where we are staying has a restaurant where we enjoyed a very good all you can eat soup bar for lunch.
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