Garrett Neese/ Daily Mining Gazette Visitors including Michigan Technological University associate professor of history Steve Walton and assistant professor of geography Mark Rhodes look at the machinery in the sawmill at Alberta Saturday. A community group working to preserve the building and reopen it as a museum hosted an open house for the public to see the building, which has been closed for several years.

ALBERTA — For the first time in years, the public was back inside the Alberta sawmill Saturday as part of an open house to highlight a community effort to preserve the building.

The community group mobilized earlier this year after word that Michigan Technological University, which owns the property, was looking at tearing down the building.

It also hosted a talk about Alberta and Henry Ford’s other operations at the Whirl-I-Gig in Pequaming last month that drew about 150 people. After raising public awareness, the next step is figuring out how to raise money for a museum and turn it into a sustainable operation.

“This isn’t the first time that somebody’s tried to do something with this mill — it just didn’t take,” said Wayne Abba, a member of the group. “Now, the way tourism has been exploding in the U.P., I think we can do more.”

The sawmill opened in 1936, part of Henry Ford’s planned community in Alberta. It is the last surviving of the three Ford sawmills in the county, the others being in Pequaming and L’Anse.

Unlike the others, the Alberta mill was intended to be more of a public demonstration of Ford productions.

Ford operated it through 1954, before funding renovations to turn the site into a museum, Michigan Tech’s website said. The mill, buildings and 1,700 acres of forest were given to Michigan Tech for educational purposes.

The site was still used through the 1970s for Michigan Tech forestry students.

Dave Stimac had first-hand experience. He was the last sawyer at the mill when Tech shut it down in 1980. A mannequin sat in his old work station a few feet away from where he stood Saturday. All afternoon, he talked with the public about his time there and the workings of the mill.

“This is amazing,” he said. “Long overdue. I’m quite impressed with the turnout.”

Once a year, he said, students would log wood that needed to be taken out and bring it to the mill.

Stimac and others would cut the log, document where it came from and how that part of the woods was managed. They would average about 7,000 feet a day.

“We did not cut for production, for speed,” he said. “We cut for quality, to get the most yield out of a log that we could.”

He was also there in 1997, when Tech put 14 logs through the mill to document the process on video.

The sawmill remained open to the public from 1996 until being closed to the public about five years ago. The electrical systems, walkways and lighting needed to be upgraded before the sawmill would be safe for the public, Tech said on its website.

The group’s plan is to restore the sawmill as a historical exhibit. Michigan Tech prepared a condition assessment of the sawmill several years ago. An engineer in the group will update it and find what the priorities are for leaks and other items that need to be addressed to stabilize the building.

Mark Rudnicki, director of Tech’s Ford Center and Forest at Alberta, said public events such as Saturday’s would need to be infrequent because of the liability concerns. But they made an exception to help the committee build momentum for its project.

Tech is working with the committee and providing feedback for its ideas. Unfortunately, Rudnicki said, the university has to prioritize funding for other parts of Alberta that fit with the university’s core mission of education and research.

“This is a really important part of Alberta and part of our historical heritage,” he said. “For all the reasons the committee wants to do it, we’re behind it as well … parents who are paying tuition do not want to see tuition dollars fixing this place up as a recreational or historical building. It needs to be done independent of Tech. But we’re supportive of it.”

The new project is also drawing interest from Michigan Tech programs.

Steve Walton’s graduate students of the history of technology will visit the site to document the process and the machinery. Students in Mark Rhodes’ industrial communities course will look at the village and the buildings.

Over the next year-and-a-half, Walton’s class will document how the lumber was brought to the sawmill, and the history of the various machines at the sawmill. He also hopes to find information on the 50-plus years of Tech operations, including production numbers.

“I don’t know if that data even exists any more,” he said. “If it does, it’ll be down in the Ford Archives in Dearborn. It’d be fun to dig into those.”

That would be submitted for possible inclusion in the Historic American Engineering Record, a collection established by the National Park Service and housed at the Library of Congress.

Rhodes’s students will collect information ahead of a drive to get the site designated on the National Register of Historic Places.

“It’s good to get our students involved in these local historic sites as well, and get them practice writing nominations, doing historical research, developing installations,” he said.

Students and group members will talk with the State Historic Preservation Office on Wednesday. Getting the backing of SHPO is the first step towards federal approval from the National Park Service to get the building onto the national register.

Nominations can be based on architecture, archaeology, an event or a person. Rhodes said the best chance is the association with Ford and his son, who was president when it was signed over to Tech.

Rhodes said he would look at connecting Ford’s attempt at a utopian community in Alberta to its role as an educational site for Michigan Tech — which, since it began more than 50 years ago, can be considered historical.

The sawmill, and the original Alberta buildings, are also still intact. That separates it from Ford sites elsewhere in Baraga County, or his other utopian communities, including one in Brazil.

People filled the building throughout the two-hour open house. Rick Wedin of Michigamme had always wanted to see the mill. As someone whose family had worked in sawmills for 150 years, he was curious to see its workings.

“It’s a good example of industrial history, and how things have evolved,” he said. “I think it’d be a terrible thing to tear this down. It’s the last of its kind around, I believe. So it’d be a big loss.”