In 1871, the Jackson, Lansing & Saginaw Railroad began laying track north from Bay City, and one year later it built a freight station called Crawford to aid nearby logging businesses that used temporary narrow-gauge rail lines. In 1873, the main line tracks from Bay City reached Crawford Station, and the following year the railroad used state and federal grants to plat the village of Grayling at that location. Railroads provided faster, more reliable transportation than horses for people, goods, newspapers, and mail between established city centers and developing towns, and a train station boosted local commerce, industry, recreation, and telegraph services. In the 1870s, narrow-gauge railroads opened all of northern Michigan to large-scale logging because their closely set steel tracks were affordable and easy to place in dense forests and hillsides where standard trains could not go, allowing logging companies to remove white pine from forests not near rivers, including the thousands of acres cut at Hartwick Pines. In 1873, the Michigan Central Railroad issued a grant to establish a service stop seven miles southeast of Grayling that became known as Pere Cheney and served as the first county seat; it grew to about 1,500 people with mills, hotels, and a post office before diphtheria ravaged it in the 1890s, and by 1917 only 18 residents remained. Grayling became a railroad hub in northern Michigan with a roundhouse where steam locomotive engines were serviced and stored, and a turntable in front of the building turned trains because early steam engines were unable or too slow to back up easily. In 1882, the railroad built a large depot in Grayling.