In addition to a rise in population, the number of sawmills (the industries that cut the wood) grew too. On the animation to the left, you can see that as the years went by, sawmills located further north, indicating that loggers were moving north as they cleared the forest in the lower part of the Michigan southern peninsula.

The growth in loggers coming to Michigan had, of course, many economic consequences but it also had many cultural consequences we might not always think of. One of those is the makeup of Michigan's population. Most loggers who came to the state in the mid 1800s came from New York, Ohio, New England, and Pennnsylvania.