You're at the corner of Front and Union, looking at a big handsome brick building — arched windows, a heavy cornice up top. Locals used to call it the Big Store. And this is the right place to meet the man who invented Traverse City, because he built this too. His name was Perry Hannah, and everyone here still calls him the Father of Traverse City. He earned it the hard way — by cutting down the forest that used to be Traverse City.
Hannah showed up in the early eighteen fifties, a farm kid from Pennsylvania, and bought the sawmill at the mouth of the Boardman River. Over the next thirty-five years, his company cut through fifty, sixty thousand acres of the valley and produced roughly one billion board feet of lumber. A billion. There is not a single old tree standing in this town that Perry Hannah didn't personally decide to leave alone, and he didn't leave many.
Now, here's the part that makes him interesting instead of just rich. When a lumber town runs out of trees, it dies. Hann
ah knew that. So instead of squeezing the place dry and leaving — which is what everybody did — he decided to build a real town that would outlive the lumber. And his method was strange. He took his own store clerks — the young men working for him behind the counter — and he encouraged them to quit and open their own shops. Competing shops. On this street. He deliberately seeded his own competitio
