As the 20th century progressed, the population of the Lake Superior copper region continued a rapid decline. The decline caused an increasingly critical labor shortage throughout the region, which created a negative impact on copper production. Mining companies could not fill vacant positions, particularly those of trammers and machine drill operators.

In 1910, the population of Houghton County was 88,098. By 1920 it had declined by 18% to 71,930. Ten years later, the population had shown further decline to 52,851.

At the same time, however, Ontonagon County’s population increased. That county’s population in 1910 was 8,650. Ten years later it had risen to 12,428. But like Houghton County, by 1930, Ontonagon’s had also declined by 10%, to 11,114. The population of Keweenaw County had already begun to decline from 7,156 in 1910, to 5,076 in 1930.

Baraga County’s population in the same 30-year period may offer some clues to explain the population decreases experienced by Houghton, Keweenaw and Ontonagon. In 1910, Baraga County’s population was recorded at 6,124. By 1920 it had increased to 7,662 and had risen, by 1930, to 9,168. The increase in Baraga’s population reflects the period during the establishment of large logging and lumber companies, such as that of Charles Hebard, Edward Hebard and H.C. Thurber, which began their operations in Pequaming in 1878. The saw mill became the largest on Lake Superior.

When Henry Ford began acquiring hundreds thousands of acres of timberland throughout the Upper Peninsula in 1920, the Hebard company sold some 40,000 acres of timberland to the auto company, which included the mill at Pequaming.

William A. Paine, president of the Copper Range Company, was not interested in Henry Ford. He had his own ideas.

Paine was a Boston investment banker and co-founder and senior partner of Paine-Webber, one of the most successful stock brokerage and investment banks in American history. Paine was also the founder and president of the Copper Range Company, which became a holding company for the Copper Range Railroad, the Baltic, Trimountain, Champion and Atlantic mining companies.

When Copper Range began surveying the railroad in 1899, Paine had already been contemplating harvesting the timber along the right of way. It was argued that timber harvesting would slow the progress of the road, so the timber was piled and burned as road building continued. Once the road was cut through, however, thousands of acres of heavily forested land was now accessible for timber, which could be transported via the railroad, allowing for the creation of logging operations and lumber mills. This included the D.A. Strattton Lumber Company, in Ontonagon County, the Beaver Area Case Lumber Company, which was located in Houghton County’s Elm River Township, in the community it created, Donken. Donken took its name from Don and Ken Case. By 1917, the lumber company cut between 20,000 and 25,000 board feet of lumber per day. The mill employed approximately 80 men, in two shifts, and another 100 working in the forests.

According to the Mid-Continent Railway Gazette, Vol, 37, NO.4, of 2004, much of the Copper Range Railroad traffic on its Gay branch, in Keweenaw County, consisted of pulpwood and timber, shipped by the Dion Lumber Company’s mill at Gay.

CCRR built two branches for the sole purpose of hauling timber for the Dollar Bay Lumber Company from an area about three miles east of Toivola. Much of the freight traffic along this branch also came from the Lake Linden Lumber Company. East of Lake Linden the Hebard Lumber Company had a logging camp on Big Traverse Bay.

The rise of the timber and lumber industry in the early 20th century, as a contributing factor of the labor shortage experienced by mining companies, began around the same time that the U.S. government began tightening immigration policies. While the region was experiencing what some company managers referred to as an exodus, the companies could no longer rely on a steady flow of immigrant workers it had up until the Great War.

Between 1904 and 1914, an average of 10 million immigrants entered the United States. The outbreak of the Great War drastically disrupted transatlantic steamship travel. At the same time the U.S. government also imposed new policies on immigration. Passport requirements, imposed by a 1918 Presidential Proclamation further reduced immigration to the United States.

While the annual reports of the largest mining companies, Calumet & Hecla, Quincy, and Copper Range, reported decreased production due to labor shortages, more and more logging and lumber companies were established, which were not challenged by a lack of laborers to any degree, even in the face of the outward migration of Copper Country residents to other regions and states. With immigration now at a low point, companies could no longer look to European immigrants to replace what some mine managers referred to as an exodus of workers.

All of this was occurring, mine workers, particularly the Finns, were leaving the mines by the hundreds to establish farms, farming communities, and their own logging and lumber companies.

To an increasing percentage of the Lake Superior copper region’s population, mining companies continued to be the center of the communities in which they operated. But, they were no longer the center of life for thousands of the region’s inhabitants.