This is Amy Wagenaar from the Historical Society of Michigan with a Michigan history moment. Michigan's 19th century logging companies had a problem. They needed a means to haul heavy logs out of forests, which at that time meant steam locomotives. But steam locomotives needed sturdy rail beds and gentle grades. Engineers considered a 3 degree grade A steep one for locomotives, and that meant cutting through hills and bridging valleys. The expense and time needed to build suitable roadbeds made logging railroads impractical. That is, until Ephraim Shay came up with a solution in 1870. Shay settled near Lansing, then moved to Herring near Cadillac, where he ran a sawmill. In about 1875, he built a narrow gauge tramway and a couple of years later hit on the idea that would make his fortune. He designed a unique steam locomotive. Conventional locomotives had drive wheels turned by drive rods. Shay's locomotive was geared with a side mounted drive shaft. The trucks, the framework that carried the wheels, could pivot. The boiler was offset to compensate for the weight of a vertically mounted motor on the other side that turned the drive shaft. People laughed at the Shea design, but they stopped laughing when they saw the shays in operation. The geared drive eliminated the pounding of the drive wheels, and the pivoting trucks allowed the shays to negotiate sharp turns in the track. Best of all, the shays could handle steep grades of as much as 6 degrees with ease. All of that meant that a shay locomotive could run on cheap, poorly built roadbeds and in mountainous terrain. The geared drive limited their speed, but low speeds posed no problem for logging or mining railroads. Ephraim Shay licensed the Lima Locomotive Works in Lima, Ohio, to build his locomotives. The first one went to a logging company in Grand Rapids in 1880. The new locomotives caught on quickly, and by 1892, Lima had sold some 300 of them. Ephraim Shay and his family moved to harbor springs, Michigan in 1888, where he built a house as peculiar as his locomotive. The Shay hexagon house had four hexagonal wings that came out from a two story hexagonal core and was clad inside and out with sheets of stamped steel. Ephraim Shay died in 1916. His hexagonal house, now owned by the Harbor Springs Area Historical Society and is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. This Michigan history moment was brought to you by michiganhistorymagazine.org.