Emergency Biohazard Cleanup Near Downtown Grayling Grayling, MI

Grayling is a city in northern Michigan's Lower Peninsula and the county seat of Crawford County — in fact, it is the county's only incorporated community.

Grayling takes its name from the Arctic grayling, a fish once abundant in the Au Sable River that disappeared from Michigan waters as lumbering destroyed its breeding grounds.

The settlement began in 1872, when Michael Sloat Hartwick, Grayling's first settler, built a log hotel beside the railroad tracks; the community was incorporated as a village in 1903 and passed through earlier names including AuSable, Forest, Crawford Station, and Milltown.

During the lumber era, Grayling's position on the Au Sable and Manistee rivers made it a major logging center, with logs floated downstream to the lakes.

Danish immigrant lumber baron Rasmus Hanson co-founded the Salling, Hanson and Company lumber firm in 1878, which dominated Grayling's early economy for nearly 50 years as a leading harvester of Michigan white pine.

In 1914, Hanson founded the Grayling Fish Hatchery in an effort to restore the grayling to the Au Sable River system; it was sold to the State of Michigan in 1926.

Hanson also donated the original land in 1913 for Camp Grayling, which grew into the largest National Guard training facility in the United States, spanning about 147,000 acres across three counties.

Grayling is the starting point of the Au Sable River Canoe Marathon, held since 1947 — a nonstop, overnight 120-mile race to Oscoda billed as the longest non-stop canoe race in North America, drawing tens of thousands of spectators each July.

Grayling had a population of 1,850 at the 2020 census.

Just outside the city, Hartwick Pines State Park preserves one of the last remaining stands of old-growth white pine forest in Michigan.