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PODCAST

North Country History with Rob Burg

Your podcast on the Forest History of the Great Lakes Region. The forests of the Great Lakes have been home to people for centuries and have provided great resources and wealth, shelter, food, and recreation for many. But in the wake of these uses, the region has been environmentally damaged from deforestation, fire, and erosion, and are still recovering to this day. I will be your guide for exploring the forests and sharing stories of the forests and the people who have called them home.About Rob

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All Episodes

66:18

A Conversation with Del Taylor: Ojibway Culture, the...

North Country History with Rob Burg ·

2026/09/22

In this episode, recorded on location in Midland, Ontario during my 2026 Podcast Tour of Ontario, Canada, I sat down with my friend Del Taylor, to talk about his life as an Ojibway in Canada, the indigenous experience, growing up on a reservation, learning important life skills from his father and mother, and about Sainte-Marie among the Hurons, the historic site that he spent forty years of his museum career doing about everything. This episode was recorded in front of an audience of D...

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56:49

Canoeing in Temagami, A North Country Adventure

North Country History with Rob Burg ·

2026/09/15

I am currently on my 2026 Podcast Tour in Ontario and I am visting my longtime friend Robert Roe. Rob is a retired Parks Canada Curator and an avid outdoorsman. Rob and I have taken two canoe trips together to Temagami in northern Ontario, north of North Bay. I sat down with him for us to talk about our two trips, the first in September 2017, and the second also in September, in 2023. Take a listen and enjoy. To leave a comment, send me a text here. Support the show

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36:38

2026 Podcst Tour Preview

North Country History with Rob Burg ·

2026/08/31

In this episode of the North Country History with Rob Burg podcast I am previewing my 2026 Podcast Tour in Ontario Canada. This tour, from September 10 to September 26 will hist several topics of forest history: the Great Lakes fur trade, the French-Indigenous people relations, the lumber industry, and liesure and recreation in the Northwoods. After a two day stop at the Straits of Mackinac here in Michigan, I will enter into Canada at Sault Ste. Marie and make a circutious route around...

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47:50

The Boundary Waters on Fire

North Country History with Rob Burg ·

2026/07/17

The Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness in northern Minnesota's Superior National Forest is just the latest place in North America to be affected by wildfires. Wildfires have been increasing over the last several decades due to numerous factors. Logging, agriculture, land development, inconsistent land management and fire protection, and climate change have all been factors leading to this increase. The ongoing "Camp" fire (the name of the fire, not a campfire) provides us with a real time ...

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52:42

Russell A. Alger: Lumberman and Civil War General

North Country History with Rob Burg ·

2026/05/25

With this episode we honor Memorial Day with the story of Russell A. Alger. Alger rose from poverty in Ohio, when he was orphaned at age 12, to a lumberman and cavalry officer in the Civil War. Having moved to Grand Rapids, Michigan in 1860, he engaged in the lumber business in the Grand River valley. After the Civil War began in April 1861, Russel Alger volunteered for the Union Army in August, 1861 as a private in the 2nd Michigan Cavalry, commanded by Col. Phil Sheridan. He was then ...

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27:43

What is the Future of the U.S. Forest Service and our...

North Country History with Rob Burg ·

2026/04/04

News this week out of the Trump Administration in Washington is that there are plans to relocate the headquarters of the U.S. Forest Service from Washington, D.C. to Salt Lake City, Utah. Along with this there are plans to downsize the staffing of the forest service, downsize reseach offices from 57 to 19, and open up more of the federally owned forest lands to logging and other operations. There is also likely the plan to downsize or even eliminate national forests in specific areas as well....

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59:20

Susan Johnston/Ozhaawashkodwekwe: An Indigenous Woman...

North Country History with Rob Burg ·

2026/03/16

In honor of Women's History Month, this week's guest Emily Macgillivray (The Outdoors Historian) joins the podcast to share the story of Ozhaawashkodwekwe, also known as Susan Johnston, an Ojibwe woman born in the Chequamegon Bay region of Lake Superior (Wisconsin), married to an Irish fur trader and a leader of her tribal clan in Bawating (Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan) where she owned a large sugar bush on nearby Sugar Island in the St. Mary's River. Maple Sugar was an important fo...

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37:49

The Saginaw Forest: The University of Michigan's...

North Country History with Rob Burg ·

2026/03/09

When the University of Michigan's School of Forestry was created in 1903, it was understood that an experimental forest was needed where forestry students could learn their trade. Saginaw, Michigan lumberman and University of Michigan Regent Arthur Hill stepped in and purchased an 80 acre tract of worn out farm land just east of the city of Ann Arbor for the program to develop the "Saginaw Forestry Farm" as Hill asked the University to name it. The Saginaw Forest, as it officially becam...

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54:07

The Big Wild--Michigan's Pigeon River Country State...

North Country History with Rob Burg ·

2026/03/02

Sportsmen and sportswomen have come to the Pigeon River Country for more than a century to recreate in the forest. Hunting and fishing have been the primary choices for outdoor recreation for many, but the state forest is also a prime spot for morel mushroom hunting, wild berry picking, camping, hiking and backpacking, horseback riding, and more. In 1986, one such visitor was former President of the United States Jimmy Carter. I first came across the fact that Jimmy Carter came to the Pigeon ...

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45:40

Gooseberry Falls State Park-The CCC along Minnesota's...

North Country History with Rob Burg ·

2026/02/23

Among the work of the Civilian Conservation Corps in Minnesota in the 1930s was the development of Gooseberry Falls State Park, one of Minnesota's most popular state parks along the north shore of Lake Superior. In 1934 the CCC arrived to build a camp on a bend of the Gooseberry River where it descends to Lake Superior. The work that Company 2710 would do at Gooseberry Falls for the next seven years included the construction of numerous stone buildings and other structures that have become so...

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57:28

The Big Wild-Michigan's Pigeon River Country State...

North Country History with Rob Burg ·

2026/02/16

Conservationist and Forest Advocate P.S. Lovejoy called the Pigeon River Forest "The Big Wild." It is one of the largest contiguous forest lands in Michigan at now over 118,000 acres. Like much of the forests of the Great Lakes, it has had its rebirth in the 20th century after the success of the 19th century lumber industry and the subsequent wildfires that followed. Ernest Hemingway summered with his family in Northern Michigan while he was growing up. Born in Oak Park, Illinois in 189...

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31:12

Frank W. May-From Slavery to Lumberman

North Country History with Rob Burg ·

2026/02/09

In honor of Black History Month, I want to introduce a unique story in Michigan History to my listeners, the story of Frank W. May, a man who was born into enslavement in Kentucky prior to the American Civil War, and after emancipation raised himself to the ownership of a sawmill in Detroit and a lumberman owning a modest logging operation in Otsego County in the Northern Lower Peninsula in the 1890s. In 2017 I had an article about Frank May published in Chronicle, the membership magazine of ...

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34:29

Christmas in a Logging Camp

North Country History with Rob Burg ·

2025/12/25

In this special episode that both celebrates the one year anniversay of the North Country History with Rob Burg podcast and celbrates the Christmas Holiday season, I share 19th Century writer John W. Fitzmaurice recounting of the celebration of Christmas in a Northern Michigan Logging Camp in 1883. Read from his book "The Shanty Boy.": Or, Life in a Lumber Camp, which recounts his experiences of traveling through the Northwoods and visiting logging camps in the 1880s while working as a hospit...

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49:06

A North Country Veteran: Dud Foster's D-Day Experience

North Country History with Rob Burg ·

2025/11/10

In this bonus episode of the North Country History with Rob Burg podcast, I am presenting the story of my late uncle, Dudley Foster and his experiences as a sailor in the U.S. Navy at the Invasion of Normandy, June 6, 1944. Dud and his wife Ang, my dad's older sister, retired to their own North Country retreat on the banks of the AuSable River just outside of Grayling, Michigan in the mid-1970s and lived out the remainder of their lives along the river. Dud kept a diary of sorts of his ...

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19:54

The Origin of the Lumberjack Breakfast

North Country History with Rob Burg ·

2025/11/03

In 2014-2015 long before I became a podcaster I briefly had a blog called "A Taste of the North Country." In it I explored the food found in the North, both historic and contemporary. At the time I was only working as a freelance historical presenter and writer, so I was doing as much economizing with food as possible, including foraging wild food (mostly wild berries), and doing my own canning. I was looking at this with the eye of the historical perspective. It also got me to think about so...

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60:01

The Passenger Pigeon

North Country History with Rob Burg ·

2025/10/06

One of the greatest extinction events happened in the forests of the Great Lakes region and Eastern North America: the Passenger Pigeon. Kyle Bagnall, the Park Naturalist for the Mackinac State Historic Parks joins me as my guest to talk about this bird, that was once the most populous bird species on the planet and how it came to being extinct in the early 20th Century. Kyle, a fellow environmental historian, and I discuss the life and history of the Passenger Pigeon, its impact on the...

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75:35

Recounting my 2025 Podcast Tour

North Country History with Rob Burg ·

2025/09/08

From July 31-August 16 I went on my first official North Country History Podcast Tour to the Northern Lower Peninsula and the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, Northern Wisconsin, and Northeastern Minnesota. I visited numerous places, learned a lot of new information and met many great people. In this final episode of the second season of the podcast, I recount my tour, visiting the numerous places that I stopped at. Many of the places that I visited and the information that I learned will b...

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74:31

The Labor of Logging, Part 3: Saw Mills and Milltowns

North Country History with Rob Burg ·

2025/09/01

Happy Labor Day! To conclude this three part series on the Labor of Logging, we look into the work at the saw mills and in the milltowns. In 1885 it was reported that there were 50,000 men working in the lumber industry in Michigan, with 20,000 employed in saw mills. As I like to say about the lumber industry, it was to Michigan in the 19th century as what the automobile industry was to the state in the 20th century. It was the major industry that drove the state's economy. And it was the ind...

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65:02

The Labor of Logging, Part 2: River Driving and Boom...

North Country History with Rob Burg ·

2025/08/25

In this second part of the Labor of Logging, I look at the labor involved with the Spring River Drives and the use of Boom Companies. The labor was the most important part of the log drives, without the men working the rivers, the logs would have never made it down the rivers to the sawmills. The drives could be very dangerous, with many men seriously injured or killed. I share a first-person account of Elmer Nolan about the danger of breaking rollways and river driving on the Tittabawasee Ri...

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50:06

The Labor of Logging, Part 1: In an Upper Michigan...

North Country History with Rob Burg ·

2025/08/18

In this first of two parts episodes in honor of Labor Day, we learn about the work that was done in the woods through the memories of John J. Heilala, who was a sixteen year-old boy who went to work in an Upper Peninsula logging camp, Ferguson's Camp 33, in 1904. John Heilala shared these memories 48 years later in an article of the same title in the March 1952 issue of Michigan History magazine. We hear of some of the work that was done through this first person account. John Heilala w...

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