Prudenville began drawing settlers in 1870 through its timber resources and the 1862 Homestead Act. Named for early developer Peter Pruden, the community was also known as Edna for a time. As the commercial center of Roscommon County, it had a post office, two hotels, many businesses, and a school. In 1882, the Roscommon Lumber Company built a stand alone railroad to move timber, including a 700-foot-long trestle above the East Bay of Houghton Lake that let logging crews push logs from train cars into the water. The logs floated across the lake to the Muskegon River and then downriver to mills at Muskegon. Between 1882 and 1887, the company employed more than seven hundred people locally and logged 175 million board feet of white and Norway pine, and in 1887 it ended logging operations in Michigan. The area's next economic surge came in the 1920s with paved roads, electricity, automobiles, and tourism.