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OJIBWAY ISLAND
Ezra Rust Drive @ the Saginaw River
Saginaw, Michigan has its own island…and it’s a shady, wonderful place, riverside walks, biking, picnics, and base ball. It is the home site for the Saginaw ‘Old Golds’- the City’s Vintage League Base Ball Team. The park was made possible by Ezra Rust. When Ezra Rust was five years old, his family moved from Wells, Vermont, to Newport (now Marine City), Michigan, where his father was a farmer. He attended school when he could and at age thirteen, started to work for his older brother, Amasa, who owned a saw mill.
While working at the mill, he spent the time “jacking logs”, which consisted of raising the logs by steam power from the river boom and sending them to the sawing table in the mill.
In 1849, he left the mill and began a six year career on various steamboats. He worked as second engineer and worked his way up to chief engineer. The ship, Pacific, went from Chicago, Milwaukee and New Buffalo, Michigan. The ship connected with the Michigan Central Railroad which was just completed, crossing the state to Detroit. At the time, Chicago was a town of 20,000 and Milwaukee had one thousand more!
Ezra continued as an engineer and became chief engineer on the E.K. Collins, which ran between Cleveland and Sault Sainte Marie. In October of 1854, the steamer caught fire at the mouth of the Detroit River, ending Ezra’s steamboat days.
He returned to Newport and went to work running a saw-mill for his brothers. His pay was $1.50 per thousand feet. For three years, he continued at the mill until the stock was depleted and his health began to fail. In hopes of regaining his health, Ezra went to Cuba where he was an engineer at a large sugar plantation.
In the years he worked on the steamboats, he frequently sent home money for his brothers to invest in timber land. The Rust brothers bought property along the Tittabawassee, Grand and Muskegon Rivers, which became the foundation of their fortunes. Since the trees along the Saint Clair River were gone, the brothers began lumbering on the Pine River in Gratiot County. The Pine is a tributary of the Tittabawassee River. There they operated a saw-mill at Salina. Ezra joined them there in 1859 and formed a partnership with James Hay which continued until Mr. Hay’s death in 1881. Rust: (“When I first came to Saginaw in the fall of 1859 there were about 3,200 inhabitants in East Saginaw and 1,700 in Saginaw City (now the West Side). There was no railroad nearer than Holly, there were no bridges across the (Saginaw) river, no paved streets except an occasional strip of plank road, sidewalks were few and poor, and in no respect save water supply (!) was there any similarity to our present flourishing city. Three rope ferries – at Mackinaw, Bristol and Genesee Streets – gave transport for teams (of horses); foot passengers were taken across the river in row boats.”) The Rust/Hay Company was very successful and when the salt mining was started in the Saginaw Valley, the men expanded with a salt works in 1862.
By 1865, Ezra had a large and profitable sawmill at Zilwaukee. In addition, there was a successful salt works. Soon Ezra formed partnerships to buy timber lands in Michigan and other nearby states, as well as the Pacific coast. The lands in Minnesota were in the Mesaba iron ore range, which made them doubly valuable.