The records of Louis Sands business interests have been arranged in seven series. These include letterpress books, journals, ledgers, time books, subsidiary volumes, associated records, and miscellaneous. The letterpress books and miscellaneous documents have been retained in their original format. The remaining material has been microfilmed.
The original relationship between much of the business records has been lost beyond reconstruction. Because of this, volumes have been grouped by type rather than by business venture. The loss of the original relationship between the volumes was responsible, as well, for the establishment of an arbitrary chronological order for some volumes.
All of the material microfilmed as well as a large quantity of material relating to Sands & Burr, bankers, which was not filmed, has been placed on permanent loan to the Manistee Historical Museum in Manistee.
The Sands Salt and Lumber Company was one of the largest lumbering concerns in Manistee, Michigan. The firm was founded by Louis Sands, a Swede who was born on July 2, 1826,and who immigrated to the United States as a young man. After spending time in Boston and Chicago, Sands came to Manistee around 1853.
Between 1853 and 1856, Sands worked as a lumberjack. In 1856, he engaged in his first entrepreneurial venture, signing a contract to log another man's property. By 1864, Sands had saved enough money to buy an interest in a saw mill, and in 1870 he purchased for himself a small saw mill located in Eastlake.
Sands business prospered. In 1878, he became the owner of the bankrupt Tyron, Sweet & Co. Saw Mill, then the largest in the city. Located at the head of the Manistee River, it was equipped with the finest machinery available. In 1879, Sands sold the Eastlake Mill to R.G. Peters, and concentrated his energy on the former Tyron mill.
Sands continually expanded the base of his business operations. In 1889, he made a major purchase of timber land from the Grand Rapids and Indiana Railroad; and to exploit it he built both a harrow gauge railroad and a saw mill at Lake City. After removing more than 100,000,000 board feet from the area, Sands moved both railroad and mill to a new location, the former site of the Reitz mill on Manistee Lake. The Reitz operation Sands established was large, including the saw mill, a cooper shop, a machine shop, and two salt mills.
Sands was also involved with a variety of other business activities. Some of these, such as salt production and the operation of several ships, were closely associated with Sands lumbering operations. Others, such as the founding of Manistee's first electric power plant and a partnership in the banking firm of Sands & Burr, were less directly related to his primary concern of lumbering.
Louis Sands died August 24,1905, yet the company which he founded continued in existence for many years after his death.
