Muskegon was the largest center of lumbering on lower Michigan’s west coast. From the 1850’s to the 1890’s, an immense amount of timber was floated to this port down the Muskegon River and its tributaries. In 1864 the Muskegon Booming Co. was formed to sort the logs and raft them to the mills. At the upper end of Muskegon Lake was the great storage boom, where logs identified by their owners’ log marks were sorted into pens as fast as they floated in, then chained together into rafts and towed to the mills by the company’s tugboats. In thirty years the company delivered over ten billion board feet of logs.