Wildfire can be devastating, but it can also renew the landscape. While European settlers viewed fire as a menace to be controlled, the Anishnaabek burned land to make it more productive. In 1917, Grayling barely escaped destruction when a fire raged so close that the village was engulfed in smoke for days, and 700 men, including 500 from the nearby national guards' camp, were mobilized along a fire line seven miles long. Government policy once treated all wildfires as bad, and in 1935 the U.S. Forest Service required them to be extinguished by 10 A.M. the day after first report, while during the Great Depression the Civilian Conservation Corps built lookout towers to detect fires and put them out quickly. This rapid suppression allowed dead wood and natural fuels to accumulate, making wildfires more severe. In 1929, Michigan founded the Forest Fire Experiment Station near Roscommon to develop methods for controlling the large wildfires that swept across the state during the white pine logging era from 1870 to 1900. Most buildings on its 6,000 acre property were built by the Civilian Conservation Corps during the early 1930s, and equipment developed there included fire-line plows and engines with offroad capability. In 2023, the station continued to assist wildfire mitigation efforts across the United States through research and innovation. In the late 1970s, fire science and forestry practices shifted toward using prescribed burning to help ecosystems thrive, with low intensity fires set to refresh grasslands and forests, clear undergrowth, cycle minerals back into the soil, encourage new plant growth, provide food and cover for wildlife, and reduce the threat of catastrophic wildfires by removing dead fuel on the forest floor. In April 2008, a locomotive without a spark arrester started the Four Mile Fire, which burned over 1,300 acres of forest, threatened Grayling, closed I-75 and M-72 because of dense smoke and flame, caused evacuations and power outages, and led to restitution payments of over $290,000 to the state and $3.3 million to the Grayling Game Club, which lost several structures and over 500 acres of its property.