The Huron Shore Region borders Lake Huron at the northeastern corner of the northern tip of the Lower Peninsula. Through it flow the waterways of the Thunder Bay, Cheboygan, Rifle, Au Sable, and Pine rivers. The abundance of fish, the vast forests and limestone deposits, and...
Attracted by the vast stands of timber, the many rivers that could be harnessed to power sawmills, and the fine gill-net fishing available in Thunder Bay, settlers arrived here in the 1830s. By 1858 the lumber industry was underway, and it continued to dominate Alpena's...
Projecting one hundred miles to the northeast into the broad waters of Lake Superior, the bold thrust of the Keweenaw Peninsula forms the most northerly reach of the state of Michigan. It is a dramatic climax to a varied and beautiful land. There was a time, however, when...
Named for John Hancock, one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence, Hancock was platted on the north shore of Portage Lake in 1858 by Samuel W. Hill, agent of the Quincy Mining Company. This eastern-based company had opened a mine and office...
Founded in 1877 as part of the development of the Calumet area in conjunction with the mining of the Calumet conglomerate lode, Laurium was a residential community for managers of the Calumet and Hecla Mining Company and for bankers, professional people, and merchants in Red...
Situated at the head of Torch Lake, Lake Linden developed around the lumber mills and the Calumet and Hecla Mining Company's stamping mills and reclamation plant. The stamping mills opened in 1866 to crush and leach out copper ore, and the reclamation plant was built in...
Painesdale is an early-twentieth-century mining community, which was planned, financed, and managed by East Coast developers and inhabited by immigrant miners and their families. The town is named after William A. Paine of Boston, founder of the Paine, Webber and Company...
Located where the Eagle River flows into Lake Superior, the village of Eagle River was founded in 1843 and platted by the Phoenix Mining Company in 1855. In the 1840s and 1850s, as eastern speculators explored the rich copper deposits in the rugged cliff to the west, this...
Three iron ranges are located in Michigan: the Marquette Range and the Menominee and Gogebic ranges. The latter two ranges also lie in Wisconsin. For some forty miles the Marquette Range stretches in a three- to ten-mile-wide belt from the city of Marquette to L'Anse on...
Marquette is located on Marquette Bay, an inlet of Lake Superior midway between the St. Mary's and Montreal rivers, which form the eastern and western boundaries of the Upper Peninsula. The city nestles beneath highlands that rise first to a plateau, then to a chain of...
William Gwinn Mather, president of the Cleveland-Cliffs Iron (CCI) Mining Company from 1890 to 1909, chose Boston landscape architect Warren H. Manning to design this model town in the Swanzy Iron District. Its purpose, Manning stated on January 20, 1908, was to create a “...
Located at the southern end of Keweenaw Bay, where the shore is rimmed with great rocky cliffs of red sandstone, L'Anse was a stopping point for French explorers, trappers, and missionaries. Growth as a shipping center for lumber was anticipated when the Marquette,...
Iron Mountain is in the center of the Menominee Iron Range. The range's most productive mines—the Chapin, the Pewabic, and the Millie—were located here. The Chapin Mine was the largest producer, yielding 27 million tons of iron ore from 1880 until 1934. From the 1870s...
Situated in a valley, Bessemer was incorporated as a village in 1887, and as a city in 1889 when it reached a population of more than 2,500. It developed after the opening of the Colby Mine and the completion in 1884 of the Chicago and North Western Railroad through here to...
Founded in 1885 and incorporated in 1889, Ironwood rapidly became the leading city on the Gogebic Iron Range. It was named either after James R. Wood, a mining captain on the range whose nickname was Iron, or after its two natural resources, iron and wood.
The arrival...
The majestic forested land of the Central Upper Peninsula lies between the rugged shore of Lake Superior on the north and the gentler sandy shore of Lake Michigan on the south. Islands and bays shelter harbors on both of the big lakes. Grand Island protects the harbor...
Incorporated as a village in 1897 and as a city in 1919, Munising is sited on Munising Bay, one of the most beautiful natural harbors in Michigan. It is encircled by steeply rising hills and faces Grand Island, to the north. First a Native American encampment, Munising...
Located in the Tahquamenon River valley, Newberry was a lumbering and woodworking center but is now given over to hunting and fishing. In 1879 Detroit and eastern investors promoted a railroad line through the wilderness to connect the Marquette Iron Range with St. Ignace....
Named for the Menominee Indians who inhabited the area along the river, where fish and game were plentiful, Menominee developed at the mouth of the Menominee River on Green Bay. By 1890, twenty-three steam-powered lumber mills operated at the twin cities of Menominee,...
Hermansville is a company town established in 1878 by Charles Julius Ludwig Meyer, of Fond du Lac, Wisconsin, founder of the Wisconsin Land and Lumber Company, a company owned and operated until 1943 by his son-in-law and descendants George Washington, G. Harold, and...
Escanaba developed as an iron shipping port in 1863 when railroad men constructed the first dock in this natural deepwater harbor on Little Bay de Noc. From this dock, ore from the Marquette, Menominee, and Gogebic iron ranges was shipped to steel centers on the lower lakes...
The Sault and Mackinac Region is strategically located at the rapids of St. Mary's River on the international boundary between the United States and Canada, and at the Straits of Mackinac where Lakes Superior, Huron, and Michigan converge. Throughout its long...
Once a frontier outpost for Jesuit missionaries, fur traders, and explorers, Sault Ste. Marie at the border of the United States with Canada is the vital link between the rich resources of the Lake Superior region and the nation's industrial centers. In 1853, with a...
Established as a territory in 1849, Minnesota occupies what was the frontier edge of the old “Northwest”—a remote and distant corner of the Louisiana Purchase. By the 1850s, early settlers relocating from New England brought with them progressive goals for education and...
The deepest of the Deep South states, Mississippi emerges as a mythic figure in film, music, and literature, symbolizing both the good and the bad in American culture, especially regarding its struggles with race and civil rights. However,...
In 1716, Jean Baptiste Le Moyne, Sieur de Bienville, governor of the French colony of Louisiana, ordered the construction of Fort Rosalie (ND16) at Natchez on a bluff overlooking the Mississippi River, the first permanent European...
Incorporated in 1811 as Wilkinson County’s seat, Woodville has barely expanded beyond its original grid plan and retains many of its Federal-style buildings. In 1842, the West Feliciana Railroad, the state’s first standard-...
Natchez is the oldest European settlement in the Lower Mississippi Valley and dates its founding to the French settlement at Fort Rosalie in 1716. Drawings and descriptions by French engineer Dumont de Montigny document the settlement’s...
In 1798 John Foster platted the sixteen-block Washington grid on a portion of his cotton plantation. In 1802 the Mississippi Territorial legislature voted to relocate the capital from Natchez to Washington and to establish...
Once a thriving river town, Rodney now has a ghostly presence that remains the most iconic of Eudora Welty’s “little chain of lost towns between Vicksburg and Natchez” as described in her Some Notes on River Country (1944). The...
