Tax Revision Helps to Save Rare Michigan Oak Trees

Donors beating the new tax law helped save 283 acres of rare, ancient red oaks that survived the lumbering era and escaped fires only to be sold to a sawmill.

“It’s the largest and least disturbed stand of red oak hardwoods in the state of Michigan and quite likely in the Great Lakes region,” said Tom Bailey, executive director of Little Traverse Conservancy.

Feared Tree Cutting

The nonprofit group, which raised about $500,000 last year, had estimated that buying the entire $1.25-million forest would take four years and feared that trees would fall to loggers in the meantime, Bailey said.

But about 400 people, many of them summer residents of the area, donated cash and stocks before the year’s end, many wanting to take advantage of more favorable tax deductions on charitable donations under the old tax law, he said.

That made final purchase of the land possible.

The oaks, more than 100 feet tall and nearly 200 years old, are on the western shore of Burt Lake at Colonial Point on land inhabited by Indians at the turn of the century and sold two years ago to James Devereaux, owner of a sawmill.

The trees’ unusually rich color and high quality caught Devereaux’s eye, but, after purchasing the land, he realized they were too good to cut, he said.

“It’s just an unusual piece of timber,” Devereaux said. “I don’t think you’d match it anywhere else.”

Fires Swept Area

The logging industry cut many such trees in northern Michigan in the 19th Century, and others burned in forest fires that swept the northern Lower Peninsula in the early 1920s.

The forest will be turned over to the University of Michigan Biological Station on nearby Douglas Lake, which will conduct research and open it to the public as a nature reserve, Bailey said.