The company was founded on August 30, 1897 by William Alden Smith, a Republican politician and former general counsel of both the Chicago and West Michigan Railway and the Detroit, Lansing and Northern Railroad.
The C&WM undertook to supply rolling stock and oversee construction in exchange for a 10-year lease of the line.
[2] The line does not appear to have been particularly profitable; it mainly transported lumber, the quantity of which declined over the next decade.
There are 14 miles of the track from Eastman Junction to the end at Stratford that is so bad that we operate it under caution and I am about to ask the railroad commission for the authority to take it up.
In 1916 the Pere Marquette cut the line back to Spencer, eliminating the 14 miles (23 km) which had so concerned it.