Industries of Manistee County

TOP INDUSTRIES OF THE AREA – Early 1900s

1. Sand: With sand dunes encompassing a good portion of the city landscape, corporations such as Sand Products mined sand from numerous places around Manistee with the highest percentage mined from the north side of the city.
2. Salt: After salt was discovered in the late 1870s, many of the owners of the sawmills drilled for salt under their various properties and found it, thus adding the manufacturing of salt to their already prosperous sawmills.
3. Sawmills: The primary industrial concern of the Manistee area was logging. Over an 80-year period most of the sawmills within the city were gathered around Manistee Lake.
4. Foundries: Along with lumber and salt, Manistee was home to a number of foundries such as the Manistee Iron Works, which produced hardware for the mills, and later the the Manistee Drop Forge tool and die factory.
5. Paper: By the mid-to-late 1910s, after many of the sawmills were ceasing operations, a group of investors was integral in starting the Filer Fibre Chemical, the precursor to today’s Packaging Corporation of America (PCA).
6. Garment: With the sawmill industry all but done by the mid- to-late 1910s, other industries such as the garment industry employed hundreds of people during that time. Many different businesses popped up such as the Cooper Underwear Factory, Marshall Fields, the Goshen Shirt Factory, and most later, Glen of Michigan.
7. Boats: In 1929, the Century Boat Company commenced the manufacturing of boats in Manistee inside a factory originally located on the northside of the river channel. For over 50 years boat manufacturing continued in Manistee employing hundreds in the process.