The Sylvania Wilderness area is tucked into the south-western edge of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, near Watersmeet, just north of the Wisconsin line. It’s about an hour and fifteen minutes drive from the WXPR station in Rhinelander, and is part of the million acre Ottawa National Forest.
Sylvania itself encompasses more than eighteen thousand acres of protected lakes and woodlands set aside as federal wilderness. No resorts. No paved roads cutting through its heart. Just forest and water in the form of living history you hike or canoe through.
Step onto one of its trails and you begin to understand why it’s so special. Sylvania holds one of the finest remaining examples of old growth forest in the Upper Great Lakes region. Towering red and white pine trees rise from glacial ridges. Clear kettle lakes rest in basins carved by retreating ice thousands of years ago. In many ways, this landscape still resembles what much of Upper Peninsula and northern Wisconsin looked like before the 1800’s logging boom reshaped it.
The name fits. “Sylvania” comes from the Latin silva, meaning forest or woodland. It is a simple word with ancient roots, and here, it couldn’t be more appropriate. What makes Sylvania remarkable is not just its beauty, but its history of preservation.
During the late nineteenth century, logging swept across the Upper Midwest at breathtaking speed. Towering pine stands were cut, rail lines pushed into remote timber, and entire swathes of forest were transformed in a matter of decades. Yet in 1897, at the height of that frenzy, Wisconsin lumberman Albert D. Johnston purchased land along Clark Lake and made an unexpected choice: not to cut it.
Instead, Johnston built a lodge and invited friends north to hunt and fish. Over time, he and a circle of businessmen including some of the biggest names of the industrial age assembled the surrounding acreage into what became known as the Sylvania Club. Organized in the early 1900s, it operated as a private hunting and fishing preserve. Members constructed cabins and trails, and managed the property for recreation. But they deliberately avoided large scale timber harvest.
While much of the surrounding Upper Peninsula became cutover land, Sylvania’s forest remained largely intact. The trees standing today include specimens that were already mature when the club was formed. What survives is not wholly untouched wilderness, it was privately owned and lightly managed, but it remains one of the closest approximations we have to the post glacial forest that once covered the region.
For decades, Sylvania functioned quietly as an exclusive retreat. Its Thompson Lodge welcomed members seeking solitude in a setting that was growing increasingly rare. But by the mid twentieth century, the national conversation around conservation began to shift.
In 1966, the United States Forest Service purchased the entire Sylvania tract for more than five million dollars, one of the earliest major acquisitions under the Land and Water Conservation Fund. The following year, in September 1967, First Lady Lady Bird Johnson traveled north to dedicate the area as the Sylvania Recreation Area, a public acknowledgment that this forest was worthy of permanent protection.
The final step came in 1987, when Congress designated Sylvania as wilderness under the Michigan Wilderness Act. With that designation came the highest level of federal land protection: no motors on interior lakes, no new development, and strict limits on mechanized access. The intent was simple. Let the forest be.
Today Sylvania contains thirty four named lakes connected by trails and portages. Canoeists move quietly across its lakes. Campers stay at rustic sites along sandy shores. The absence of engines allows the wind to carry the echoing sounds of loons for miles around.
Northwoods naturalist and author John Bates has counted Sylvania among the finest remnants of apex forest left in the Midwest, a rare and sacred living example of what this country once looked like before sawmills and railroads changed it forever.
In the Northwoods, history is often measured in board feet and boomtowns. Sylvania tells a different story. It shares the story of a lumberman who chose not to cut. Of a private club that valued preservation over profit. Of a federal government that found the value in the tree left standing, a landscape the way mother nature intended, and stepped in before it could be fragmented. And of a wilderness designation that ensured the decision would endure. Beneath those tall pines, the past is not something you read about. It is something still standing.
The Sylvania Wilderness area is open to the public year round, and free to visit much of the year. It is the perfect late winter place for a snowshoe or cross country ski outing, where you’ll find an abundance of tranquility, and a lack of mosquitos.
Be sure to stop into the Ottawa National Forest visitors center in Watersmeet on your way to Sylvania and check out their history display, in partnership with the Northern Waters Museum of Land O Lake. Say hi Karl, the visitor center manager and tell him the Northwoods Historian sent ya!
Sources: Ottawa National Forest Visitor Center. Northern Waters Museum, Land O’ Lakes. “Our Living Ancestors”, John Bates.
