Congregational United Church of Christ
Albert Township, Montmorency County, Michigan
Marker Inscription
Lewiston developed in 1891-1892 around the Michelson and Hanson Lumber Company. Dr. U.H. Traver and George Tuxworth held the first religious meetings in the lumber camp. The Reverend A.M. Hills was sent by the Congregational Conference of Michigan to hold… transcription continues on the marker
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The Story
The town of Lewiston grew up in 1891-1892 around the Michelson and Hanson Lumber Company, one of the operations that fed Michigan's great timber boom. As in many lumber camps, faith arrived with the settlers: Dr. U.H. Traver and George Tuxworth held the first religious meetings among the workers, and the Congregational Conference of Michigan sent the Reverend A.M. Hills to organize a congregation. From those camp gatherings grew the church commemorated here.
Why it matters
The story ties together two engines of the northern frontier, the lumber industry that built the town and the frontier church that gave it a moral and social center.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
In the closing years of the nineteenth century, Michigan's north was one of the great engines of the American timber boom. The state's vast pine forests were being felled at a furious pace to build the growing cities of the Midwest, and where the timber went, the towns followed. A sawmill and a rail connection could conjure a settlement out of empty forest in a single season.
Lewiston was one such creation. It took shape in 1891 and 1892 around the Michelson and Hanson Lumber Company, an operation of the kind that dotted the region — mill, camp, company houses, and the rough beginnings of a Main Street. These were young, raw, overwhelmingly male communities, built fast and organized around the work of cutting and milling wood.
Life in a lumber town could be hard and disorderly. The work was dangerous, the hours long, and the winters severe. Into that environment, settlers brought not only their tools but their faith, and one of the first tasks of any young frontier community was to make room for a church.
People & events
Religion in Lewiston did not begin with a building; it began with a gathering. Dr. U.H. Traver and George Tuxworth held the first religious meetings right in the lumber camp — the kind of improvised worship, in a bunkhouse or a cleared space, that so often preceded a proper congregation on the frontier.
Word of such gatherings traveled to the wider church, and the Congregational Conference of Michigan responded by sending the Reverend A.M. Hills to organize the scattered worshippers into a settled congregation. That pattern — local lay believers keeping faith alive until an ordained minister could be dispatched — was how Protestant churches took root across the newly settled interior.
From those beginnings grew the congregation commemorated here, later carried forward under the banner of the United Church of Christ. The three names on the marker stand for the two kinds of people every frontier church needed: the neighbors who started it on their own, and the minister sent to give it form and permanence.
Its place in the American story
The story of this church is really the story of how faith followed the frontier across America. Wherever the country's economic reach extended — a mining camp, a railroad town, a lumber settlement — churches sprang up close behind, often before the streets were even properly laid out.
These frontier churches did far more than hold Sunday services. In a young town with few institutions, the church was the social center, the moral anchor, the place where a rootless, transient population could become an actual community. It hosted weddings and funerals, schooling and charity, and gave a rough settlement a sense of shared life.
Lewiston's origins also capture a defining chapter of the national economy: the great timber harvest that built the Midwest. The pairing on this marker — a lumber company and a congregation, rising together in the same two years — is a near-perfect emblem of how industry and faith together turned wilderness into settled American towns.
If you visit
Come to Lewiston with an eye for how a town remembers its own beginnings. The marker ties the present-day community back to its founding around the Michelson and Hanson mill, and the church it commemorates carries that thread of continuity across well over a century.
Look for the ways a lumber town's origins still shape the landscape — the pattern of the streets, the age of the older buildings, the relationship of the settlement to water and woods. The great pine forests that first drew people here are long since transformed, but the community they seeded endured, which is more than many timber towns can say.
It's a fitting stop on a drive through Montmorency County's lake country. Pause at the marker, read the names of the men who first gathered the faithful, and consider that the church you're standing near began not as a building but as a handful of people meeting in a rough camp, determined to make a real town out of a place built to cut wood.
Written by AI to add context, grounded in the marker’s inscription and the historical record. The inscription above is the original, unaltered text.
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Related people
- · Dr. U.H. Traver
- · George Tuxworth
- · Rev. A.M. Hills
Themes & tags
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