Published: January 04, 2009 10:02 am      

Baron 'wannabes' who became even more

Perry Hannah and A. Tracy Lay were lumber baron "wannabes" in their mid-20s when they started Hannah, Lay & Co. in the virgin forests of northwestern lower Michigan.

They became self-made millionaires through their ambition, business sense and hard work, but they had two other things going for them: their vision, and strong financial backers with close ties to the lumber district, docks, venture capitalists, shipping and railroads.

Perry Hannah

Hannah, the son of Scottish-American farmers, was born near Erie, Pa., on Sept. 22, 1824. His mother, Ann, died three years later. His father, Elihu, moved to Port Huron the following year to work for a lumbering operation, leaving Perry, his brother and two sisters with relatives.

Perry lived with his grandmother and attended public schools until he was about 14, and then went to Port Huron to help his father raft logs from Port Huron to Detroit.

At 18, he found a job at a Port Huron dry goods business and one day in 1846 he helped make arrangements to ship lumber to Chicago. The lumberman paid him enough money to book passage on a steamer to Chicago.

He soon found a new job with Jacob Beidler, one of the city's wealthiest lumbermen, for $400 a year, returning now and then to buy lumber in Port Huron to ship to Chicago.

In 1850, Hannah, Lay and James Morgan created Hannah, Lay & Co., with Beidler's help. The wholesale-retail firm transported lumber by boat to Chicago, then the nation's fastest-growing city, and sold it in smaller quantities to retailers. Hannah was senior partner. James Morgan's brother, William, joined the firm a little later.

James Morgan, an English-born silent partner in the company, was principally involved with the firm's real estate interests in Chicago, as well as his own land holdings and business interests. He came to the United States when he was 6 and was the grandson of a well-known London banker and financier.

Like the others, he was in his mid-20s when the company was formed.

Hannah served one term in the Michigan Legislature from 1857-1858. He married Ann Flynn of New York on Jan. 1, 1852. The couple had three children -- Hattie, Julius T., and Claribel. Hattie married J.F. Keeney of Chicago in 1884 and Claribel married George Gardner of St. Paul, Minn., in 1895. Julius died prematurely the year after his father's death.

Hannah's wife, Ann, died in 1898.

A. Tracy Lay

Lay came from a fairly prominent upstate New York family.

He was born June 18, 1824, in Batavia to attorney George W. and Olive (Foote) Lay. His father served in the U.S. House of Representatives from 1833 to 1836. His uncle, Phineas L. Tracy, served the same district from 1827 to 1833.

The third of three sons, Lay attended private school until he was 16 and clerked for the next eight years in a country dry goods store.

Batavia is located about 40 miles east of Buffalo, which had been a gateway to the West for a flood of land-hungry settlers and immigrants after 1825 when the Erie Canal opened. And Chicago, though considered swampy and therefore unhealthy, was an important port -- and marketplace.

By October 1849, Lay was on his way to the Windy City too. Within a year, he met Hannah ... the rest is Traverse City history.

Hannah and Lay opened a wholesale business in Chicago in 1850 and looked for opportunities to buy timber stands of their own. By 1851, they heard that a water-run sawmill and 200 acres of timber at the south end of Grand Traverse Bay might be available.

Hannah and William Morgan sailed north that April to look it over and bought it for $4,500 from Captain Harry Boardman, a Napierville, Ill., farmer whose son Horace had started it in 1847.

Lay made his first trip north in August 1851, to supervise construction of a new saw mill, and returned to Chicago in October. He came back the following year to lay out the town on a plat map with the help of civil engineer Thomas Whelpley. Over the next four to five years, he oversaw lumber operations here from April to October, while Hannah did the rest of the year.

Both men also kept residences in Chicago.

In 1853, Lay went to Washington, D.C., and successfully lobbied for a post office in what was coming to be called "Grand Traverse City." The clerk who was registering it suggested he drop "Grand" from the name, which is how the little village in a vast wilderness got its name. Old Mission was the closest post office until then.

Lay also obtained a four-year contract, for $400 a year, to run a new mail route between Traverse City and Manistee. The first mail carrier was Jake Tapasan, a local Indian, who at first made the weekly round-trip on foot between the two lumber towns.

In 1853, Lay ran for the state Legislature but was defeated by Mormon "King" James Strang of Beaver Island, a Democrat.

Lay married Catherine Smith of Batavia in 1855 and they had four daughters. Only two, Olive and Katherine, survived into adulthood. Katherine later married R. Floyd Clinch, who became an important figure in Traverse City's history in the first decades of the 20th century.

Lay ended up outliving his partner by well over a decade, dying on March 19, 1918, in Chicago at age 94.

-- By Loraine Anderson