Provided photo One of the buildings in Alberta Village. Alberta Fest, featuring a variety of activities is Saturday.

Bet you thought Alberta was a province in western Canada. It is, but it’s also a hidden wonder right here at home, one the public can visit and explore. And they’ll have a chance to do just that at Alberta Fest on June 28.

Alberta Village nestles in thousands of acres of forest located on U.S. Highway 41 eleven miles south of L’Anse. Built by Henry Ford for his workers in 1936, the centerpiece of Alberta Village is the sawmill Ford used to cut lumber for his classic “Woody” station wagons and other vehicles he was building in the 1930s and 1940s.

Ford liked to take road trips, and the story goes that he was driving through the woods south of L’Anse when he stopped, looked around and exclaimed, “Why not build a plant here? This is amazing. We should build a plant here.”

Within two days, the bulldozers were hard at work.

Ford dammed Plumbago Creek to create a reservoir to supply water to the sawmill and the workers’ village that he built around it.

The original village included 12 houses and two schools for the sawmill’s approximately 25 workers and their families. The houses were built on the reservoir side of the highway, nestled up against the surrounding woods. Far from typical mill worker housing, they featured every modern convenience of the day: hot air heating, modern bathrooms, basements and kitchens with built-in cupboards.

Interestingly, Alberta Village was not originally designed to be a production sawmill. “It was a PR project,” says Dave Stimac, a woodworker who was head sawyer at the mill for many years. Stimac still lives at Alberta Village, where he crafts unique custom furniture and runs a gift shop. “Ford wanted to demonstrate what a model mill town would look like.”

Still, the sawmill did produce wood for Ford vehicles. It had the capacity to turn out 14,000 board-feet of hardwood and 20,000 board-feet of softwood lumber a day.

The wood came from the thousands of acres of forest surrounding Alberta Village. The workers were loggers too. Every man was expected to log a 60-acre section. Living far from shops and markets, each also farmed a 20-acre plot, providing fresh food for their families.

Alberta Village was named after the daughter of Ford’s chief engineer of U.P. operations, Alberta Johnson.

For the past six years, Michigan Technological University’s Ford Center, which now owns Alberta Village, has invited the public to a celebration called Alberta Fest. This year, Alberta Fest will be on Saturday, June 28. Artists and crafters will display their wares. Musicians will perform. The Finnish consulate, the Keweenaw Bay Indian Community, student organizations from MTU and others will have cultural displays, and an antique car show will feature the iconic Woodies and other restored cars from Henry Ford’s era. The Ford Center hopes to offer walking tours of the village.

After he closed the sawmill in 1954, Ford donated the village and 3,700 acres of forest surrounding it to MTU. “Today the place is here to educate everyone,” says Jim Tolan, operations manager of the MTU Ford Center and Forest. “The only reason Michigan Tech is here, doing what it does today, is that Henry Ford stopped here and was enchanted with the place in the 1930s.”

The university calls the Ford Center and Forest “a classroom as big as all outdoors.” It’s a research field station, and forestry students take residential field camp training there. K-12 teachers and natural resource professionals do field work and take what they learn back to their classrooms and workplaces. The center sponsors special events like maple syrup-making workshops and Alberta Fest. They also host conferences and business meetings, and even occasionally weddings.

The old sawmill itself is closed, but renovation work has begun, thanks to the efforts of a community organization working with the Baraga County Historical Museum. Eventually they hope to partner with MTU to reopen it as a museum.

Tolan invites everyone to attend Alberta Fest. “It’s a fun nod to history, the present and the future,” he says.

For more information about Alberta Fest, call 906-487-4384 or email fordcenter@mtu.edu.