The Saginaw River Watershed was crucial in the development of Michigan. In the 1830s, when white settlers moved into the area, they discovered rich timberlands and hundreds of miles of rivers that provided an excellent base for lumbering, which soon thrived there. In 1834 Gardner and Ephraim Williams opened the first steam mill at the foot of Mackinaw Street in Saginaw. By 1854 the Saginaw Valley had become the leading producer of lumber in the state, a distinction it held for the next forty years. In 1869 the watershed area alone was earning seven million dollars yearly from lumbering, and Michigan was producing more lumber than any other state. This extraordinary output was made possible by a carefully organized process that was constantly improved through invention and imagination. Cooperative boom companies collected logs and floated them downstream to the mouths of tributaries. Using company marks, the logs were separated there into floating booms and then formed into rafts held together by rope and wedge-shaped oak pins. The Saginaw was one of the few rivers to use wooden pins extensively. The greatest impact on production, however, came from saws, as refinements in blades and the introduction of gang saws increased capacity so dramatically that in 1882 the Saginaw yielded one billion board feet of lumber. By the 1890s, loggers had depleted their raw material and much of mid-Michigan was cut-over, barren land, bringing the Saginaw lumbering era to an end.