Pine Lodge on its dedication day, May 25, 1925. (Image courtesy of U-M Bentley Historical Library.)

On a Friday afternoon in early April, 1925, a kid named Windy Sims stood near a sharp bend in the Huron River about a mile north of the Diag. He was watching a couple of his pals—fellow members of a University of Michigan student club grandly named the Society of Les Voyageurs—who were marking off a 25′-by-30′ rectangle on a patch of weeds.

Sims was doubtful. That space, he observed, didn’t look big enough for a hat rack and a bird cage. But the surveyor’s tape stayed put, and the next morning, Sims reported later, “the gang turned out en masse and things happened with a vengeance.”

Six weeks later, the Voyageurs were ready to dedicate a raw redwood cabin, not quite finished, as “Pine Lodge,” likely the only home of a U-M student organization built by the members who would use it.

Come one, come all

The society was the brainchild of a student from Presque Isle County, on northern Lake Huron, named Elmer “Lindy” Lehndorff. As a boy he had fallen in love with the woods in the era when Theodore Roosevelt was urging young Americans to embrace “the strenuous life” and spend time in the country’s shrinking wilderness. In 1906, Lindy and friends Larry Larke and Chester MacKenzie dubbed themselves the Society of Les Voyageurs, after the North American fur traders of old. A year later, with more members (many of them majors in the old School of Forestry, today’s School of Natural Resources and Environment), they were officially recognized by the University.

An original invitation to initiates. (Image courtesy of U-M Bentley Historical Library.)

Activities got underway that soon came to be regarded as sacred traditions—campground initiations at Whitmore Lake, Sunday night “feeds,” and an annual canoe trip from the tiny village of Lakeland on Zukey Lake down the Huron through Hudson’s Mills and Dexter to Ann Arbor.

From the beginning, Lehndorff and his cohorts had dreamed of building a forest cabin for their club. But funds were tight, and they had to make do with city quarters—first a single upstairs room in the Henning block on Huron near Main, then a space over the Bijou Theater on Washington, then above Switzer’s Hardware on State. For two years in the early 1920s, the “L.V.s” would hike out to Saginaw Forest, a University preserve west of town, where the School of Forestry let them use its cabin. But even for these hardies, that was impractical for winter meetings.

Simple economics forced a change. The enrollment boom of the ’20s was making space scarce around campus and sending rents skyward. Without a good place to meet, the L.V.s found it hard to attract new initiates. To save their society, they resurrected Lindy Lehndorff’s dream of a forest cabin.

A “dull blue haze” of labor

For a time they set their sights downriver, hoping to find a spot southeast of the campus between the Huron and Geddes Avenue. They envisioned a fieldstone retreat—essentially one big room with a fireplace and a kitchen. They weighed one site after another until they settled on a spot on the Huron just far enough away to feel wooded and remote from the campus grind, yet close enough to be convenient. Looking south from the site, the works of man were prominent—Argo Dam and the Edison Illuminating Company’s generators. But to the north one could only see a vista of river and woods nearly a mile long.

The society’s yearbooks do not record how much was paid for the land or materials, though the boys had estimated the cost at about $2,000, with contributions from the actives and alumni, “if the boys contribute a major portion of the labor.” More than 40 alumni pitched in, and one of them, Harry “Habe” Mills, volunteered to supervise construction. Then the “actives” stepped up to work.

In a single day, armed only with shovels, they dug trenches for the footings and poured concrete to make a foundation. On Sunday, Clyde Tessmer, an Ann Arbor mason donating his time, laid footings for the fireplace and porch piers.

The next weekend, in “a dull blue haze” of labor, the boys pounded enough nails to install the sub-floor and raise exterior walls made with planks of Oregon redwood sent by train from out west by an L.V. alumnus. (Legend has it the train made a special stop to drop the lumber right near the Voyageurs’ building site.) Four of the actives stuck around over the spring break and readied things for professional carpenters to install a roof, a job even they considered “a bit too technical for the free labor.” Voyageurs scouted the vicinity for stones for the fireplace and chimney. (Some reportedly were liberated from Fairview Cemetery, just up the hill).

Before the approach of exams shut down construction for the summer, a reasonable facsimile of Lindy Lehndorff’s vision was standing near the river’s edge. Actives and alumni gathered for the dedication on May 25, 1925, though Lehndorff was not there. He had died in the great influenza epidemic of 1918-19.

John Stahl was “Keeper of the Legends,” or secretary, at the time of construction.

“The fact that we are now building a home of our own has drawn the men of this organization into a more compact, more efficient group,” Stahl wrote, “to whom large tasks will seem easy, and to whom no task will seem too large.”

Cabin on the river

Nearly 90 years later, the cabin on the Huron still stands, weather-beaten but sound, and it still houses the Voyageurs. They have initiated class after class of members with a strong interest, professional or personal, in the outdoors. Several Voyageurs helped to organize the U-M Teach-In on the Environment that led to the nationwide Earth Day in 1970. A number have become prominent in the natural sciences and environmental protection, including John F. Turner, director of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service under President George H.W. Bush. Many have become naturalists and teachers. Women, first admitted in the early 1970s, now make up many of the members and leaders. The Voyageurs claim to be the oldest student organization extant at Michigan save the Men’s Glee Club.

The Voyageurs’ cabin still stands today, weather-beaten, but sound. (Image courtesy of James Tobin.)

The cabin, despite occasional remodeling, remains much the same as it was in the 1920s, though the firs planted soon after construction have grown tall. Civilization in the form of a pleasant residential neighborhood has encroached at the borders of the property. But a pile of canoes still waits in back for spring, and a couple of cords of fresh-cut firewood stand in the yard. Over the fireplace inside, a stout log mantelpiece bears the legend: “Let the fires of friendship burn forever.”

Sources include A History of Les Voyageurs and the Society’s annuals, all at the Bentley Historical Library; L.V. alumnus John Russell; and Sam Wainwright, “Where the wilderness lovers are,” The Michigan Daily, 11/10/09.