Wisconsin Land & Lumber Company.

The Wisconsin Land and Lumber Company of Hermansville, Michigan was originally founded as a subsidiary firm of Charles J. L. Meyer, a successful Chicago and Wisconsin businessman. Meyer, following the Chicago fire of 1871, made a fortune by expanding his door and sash manufacturing plant located in Fond du Lac, Wisconsin. As one of the few such facilities in the upper Great Lakes region, Meyer profited handsomely from the rebuilding of Chicago.

By the mid-1870s, lumber supplies in the Lake Winnebago region of Wisconsin were being depleted; and Meyer, to insure himself a supply of wood, purchased the Menominee County, Michigan land holdings of the Hamilton Merriman Company. In 1879, Meyer relocated the sawmill he owned in Fond du Lac to his Michigan property. The site of the mill became Hermansville (named after his son). Mill No. 1, as the facility was called, was a softwood mill, preparing pine for shipment to Fond du Lac. His Michigan property, however, also had significant stands of hardwood trees on it, ands so, in 1882, Meyer began to operate kilns in Hermansville to convert the hardwood into charcoal.

The production of charcoal never proved profitable, however, and Meyer continued to search for a way to use his hardwood lumber. After much study, he concluded that a market did exist for hardwood floors. The problem was that there was no satisfactory machinery to mill hardwood into flooring. After years of experimentation, he finally perfected his "Meyer matchers," milling machines which made possible the mass production of acceptable hardwood flooring. Meyer had begun construction of a hardwood flooring facility in Hermansville in 1885. That factory was completed in 1888 and the first regularly scheduled commercial production in the plant began in 1889.

While Meyer had identified a potential market and developed the necessary machinery to produce an acceptable product, he was unable to deal successfully with his rapidly failing financial situation. In the fall of 1889 his five companies fell into the hands of creditors, who appointed Henry A. Jewell to oversee operations. To pay the creditors, Jewell sold all of Meyer's asset except for Wisconsin Land and Lumber in Hermansville. When the firm emerged from receivership in 1892, C.J.L. Meyer was titular head of the Wisconsin Land and Lumber Company, but actual control of the company had slipped into the hands of his son-in-law, Dr. George Washington Earle.

Earle, who had received his medical degree from Buffalo Medical College and practiced in New York State, had come to Hermansville in 1889 for reasons of health. He had already invested in Wisconsin Land and Lumber and throughout the period of receivership and the next few years, he found himself pouring more and more money into the firm, in an effort to save his initial investment. As his financial investment grew, so too did his control of day-to-day operations.

For a time the firm's finances remained precarious, suffering a serious setback when Mill No. 1 burned in 1891 and had to be rebuilt. In the end, however, Meyer's estimate that there was a steady trade in hardwood flooring proved accurate, and the firm flourished. In 1901 the pine mill (No. 1) was rebuilt. In 1910 it burned and was replaced. In 1911 the hardwood mill (No. 2) was rebuilt of concrete. In 1909 the firm was assured an adequate supply of timber when it bought the assets of the bankrupt William Mueller Company at a sheriff's sale. Most significant in this sale were large stands of timber near Blaney, Michigan.

G. W. Earle died in 1923. His sons, G. Harold and Stewart, took over the family business. During the 1930s, the firm entered a period of slow decline. In 1939 the No. 2 mill closed, followed by the No. 1 mill and the flooring factory in 1943.

From the guide to the Wisconsin Land & Lumber Company records, 1871-1920, (Bentley Historical Library, University of Michigan)