MANISTIQUE

Region: Manistique and the Garden Peninsula

Photography Plus

Manistique's ice-free harbor made it especially attractive for shippers. It started to boom in the 1890s when huge volumes of logs were floated down the Manistique River.

Once an important Lake Michigan port at the mouth of the Manistique River, Marquette is an old lumber and paper mill town. Downtown is on the plain side but attractively spiffed up with streetscape improvements. Manistique was served by the Upper Peninsula's major east-west railroad long before there were roads. That and steamships, and later the Ann Arbor Railroad carferry from Frankfort, enabled it to become an early resort area of cottages and small resorts on nearby fishing lakes, especially Indian Lake. Today the widely used boardwalk along Lake Michigan has played up Manistique's scenic strong points.
 

1930s WPA mural painted for the Manistique Post Office. These iconic paintings captured local historic highlights, in this case the work of turn-of-the-century lumbermen in nearby forests.

Like most U.P. towns, Manistique has a smaller population than it had during its heyday (3,500 in 2002 vs. 5,400 in 1940). It started to boom in the early 1890s; the population jumped to 4,000. By then Manistique was already a major Upper Peninsula port, thanks to its location at the Manistique River mouth, important in logging river drives because of its extensive watershed. Manistique's ice-free Lake Michigan harbor was much closer to lumber markets than Lake Superior ports. In 1887, the new Soo Line railroad between Minneapolis and Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario, created a station in Manistique, and the town became an even more important shipping point. That development led seven brothers from Chicago to form the Chicago Lumber Company. It built a great deal of company housing and created subsidiary industries: a box factory, a broom factory, and a chemical plant. Local sawmills turned out Manistique's most lucrative product, white pine boards, at the rate of 90 million board feet a year. Commercial fishing was another major industry.
 

The Manistique Clyde’s Drive-In is a classic diner in a classic location, serving employees of Manistique Paper across the tracks. Manistique’s landmark water tower appears in the background.

William S. Crowe arrived in Manistique in 1893 as a teenager to work in its booming lumber industry. He described the woods, large-scale logging, and town life in Manistique in his first-hand Lumberjack memoir, initially published in 1952. It has now been reissued with many period illustrations and some explanatory footnotes as Lumberjack: Inside an Era in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. Crowe considered life in most all northwoods lumber towns to be the same, and Manistique's story to be prototypical. One myth he energetically dispels is the notion that logging towns were lusty and bawdy, and streets were unsafe when lumberjacks came out of the woods in spring. Crowe regarded Manistique as an optimistic, orderly, generally delightful place to live. He gives special attention to using his own first-hand experience to destroy the credibility of Call It North Country: The Story of Upper Michigan, republished in 1986 by Wayne State University Press. Call It North Country was written by the colorful, imaginative magazine writer John Barlow Martin, well known to readers of the Saturday Evening Post in the 1940s and 1950s. Martin was born after Manistique lumbering was basically over. Crowe says he valued drama, storytelling, and sensationalism over truth.
 

The boardwalk begins downtown and soon dips past a marsh with many ducks. The big recycle paper mill is in the distance.

After 1900, as the white pine gave out, the fishermen and resorters became a more important part of the local economy, and other industries moved in. Most important was the giant paper mill now known as Manistique Papers. The plant and its big "Recycle America" sign are easily seen from U.S. 2 looking north from the bridge over the Manistique River. The publisher of the Minneapolis Tribune founded the plant circa 1920 to control the supply and price of the newspaper it needed.

Today Manistique Papers claims to be North America's largest recycler of catalogs, magazines, and junk mail, all de-inked, turned into pulp, and then once more made into paper that's used for ad inserts, food carryout bags, office papers, envelopes, and more. Curbside recycling programs are one source of paper to recycle. This was the first paper mill to be chlorine-free. It recycles enough paper to keep some 2.4 million cubic yards out of landfills. The paper mill has long been Manistique's biggest employer. Its current workforce is about 150. The mill and its big "Recycle America" sign are easily seen from U.S. 2 looking north from the bridge over the Manistique River.

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