Alcona County has always ridden the waves of economic development, with its booms and busts, crests and troughs.

Alcona’s motto is “The First of the 83,” because it tops the list of Michigan counties in alphabetical order. But, sorted by 21st century prosperity, Alcona County is further down the list.

The fish came — and went — first.

Plentiful stocks of lake trout, whitefish, herring, and other desirable species attracted the first settlers of European ethnicity, mainly from New York state and Ontario. The first fishing families fetched up at “The High Banks” (later Springport, now Harrisville) in the 1840s, and, in 1855, others established a settlement at “The Cove” (later the city of Alcona, now the best known “ghost town” in the eponymous county).

When fish stocks declined, the lumber boom commenced. Vast expanses of virgin conifer trees attracted land speculators, who purchased enormous holdings and deployed crews of lumberjacks to fell the trees, and teams of draft horses to haul the logs out of the forest.

Sawmills at Springport, Harrisville, Alcona, and Black River cut the huge trunks of White Pines into planks, and long docks at those locations allowed lumber schooners to load. They transported Alcona County lumber across the Midwest, where it built farmhouses across the Great Plains. From the late 1860s until the early 1900s, White Pine and Eastern Hemlock pumped money into Alcona County, and the lumber towns boomed. Alcona had a population of 800, with a hotel, three saloons, several fish houses, the sawmill, and streets lined by private dwellings.

All are gone.

Black River also ballooned. It was essentially the private property of a fabulously successful investor, Russell Alger, who owned most of the adjacent real estate, and established railroads into the woods to ease the removal of the dwindling stands of timber. Alger, who went on to the U.S. Senate and became secretary of war, built a mansion in Black River. He constructed a roundhouse there to serve three mini-locomotives, which ran to his logging operations. The roundhouse burned in 1886, spelling the end for the boomtown. Alger’s mansion melted into the ground in the 1970s, along with the rest of the Black River “ghost town.”

Tourism came to the rescue, for a while. Hubbard Lake enjoyed a statewide vogue, when Churchill Point Resort ran an excursion steamer. That didn’t last. Churchill Point still exists, but Hubbard Lake is no longer as famous a vacation destination.

Hunting held some promise. Baseball Hall of Famer Hazen “KiKi” Cuyler, who played with the Tigers and the Cubs, brought his celebrity status back to his hometown of Harrisville, and became known as a skilled marksman. His “Dugout Lounge” became the center for visiting hunters. Some of those visitors formed “hunt clubs” that bought up thousands of acres of cheap land, which had been clear-cut and then had burned. The acreage was useless for growing more trees (the forest fires had been so intense that they incinerated the White Pine rootstock), and for agriculture, but whitetail deer and other macrofauna loved the scrub. Most of the county is still in the hands of “hunt clubs.”

The booms all busted.

Meanwhile, we may soon see new “ghost towns.” Killmaster has recently attained “ghost town” status on certain websites. Drive past the empty storefronts on Harrisville’s Main Street, and you will note a ghost-like aspect to the place.

Where does Alcona County go from here? Will Northeast Michigan become a retail desert, with the lights only on at Dollar General outlets?

Future columns will address those and other questions, about a region that sometimes has a certain Third World feel …