Manistique and the Garden Peninsula

Creative U.P. signage along US-2.

At unforgettable Kitch-iti-kipi (Big Spring) a mighty underground spring bubbles up into a deep clear pond, enchantingly green with moss. Seul Choix Point Lighthouse offers sweeping Lake Michigan views clear to the Beaver Islands. Its maritime museum interprets centuries of boating here.

Manistique's motel row enjoys a Lake Michigan view and access to a pleasant two-mile lakefront pathway into town. Before Europeans arrived, Native Americans camped all along this shoreline because it was milder and calmer than the Lake Superior shore.

Capturing the home-made flavor of many U.P. businesses is "Cedar Stuff" along US-2 between Escanaba and Manistique.

Scores of fishing lakes are northwest of Manistique. The early magnet for small resorts was 8,659-acre Indian Lake. It's one of Michigan's largest inland lakes, fed by an enormous surrounding stretch of marshlands. Only five to ten feet deep in most places, it's home to lots of good-sized walleye, yellow perch, and smallmouth bass.

Beyond Indian Lake, a 25-mile stretch of Hiawatha National Forest land extends north nearly to Munising. Fifty-two lakes are in northwestern Schoolcraft County alone, and many more are in adjacent parts of Delta and Alger counties. See the Pictured Rocks region for information on this "Lake Country" area. More federal land not far north of Manistique is the Seney National Wildlife Refuge, a magnet for birders from near and far. Find it as a point of interest in our Grand Marais/Seney/Tahquamenon chapter.

North of Manistique, state forest land accounts for quite a bit of Schoolcraft County, too, as revealed by look at the big county map in Universal Map's Michigan County Atlas.

As in most of the Upper Peninsula, logging was a major part of the region's early development – an era vividly detailed in William S. Crowe's first-hand account, Lumberjack: Inside an Era in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, now reissued and illustrated with photographs and postcards of the logging era. Mills and ports were at Manistique, Nahma, and Thompson. The huge paper plant in Manistique is an important legacy of the area's forest products industry.

Manistique today offers more than meets the casual eye, thanks in large part to enterprising small businesspeople who have chosen to live and work in this relaxed little northwoods town. The Traders' Point commercial and condo development with bookstore and cafe is on the Manistique River site that used to be coal docks for the Ann Arbor Railroad carferry.

As the woods were logged off, the area reoriented itself to fishing-related tourism and to commercial fishing, too. Beginning in 1877 Manistique's harbor was used by steamships bringing vacationers to the area's hotels and cottages. They came from Green Bay and, later, from Chicago and Lower Michigan.

Commercial fishing still continues here at Garden and Fairport on the Garden Peninsula. At Fairport fishermen once caught and penned six-foot-long sturgeon. "At times," reports the 1941 Michigan Writers' Project Michigan: A Guide to the Wolverine State, "the sturgeon were frozen and piled on the shore like cordwood awaiting shipment."


Sand beaches alternate with rocky limestone points and shoals along the Lake Michigan shore here. The Garden Peninsula, a long limestone finger, extends 21 miles south into Lake Michigan, whose moderating waters give it a climate as mild as mid-Michigan. (For decades marijauna growers have loved its favorable climate and isolation.)

Extensive limestone deposits have played an important role in the local economy, beginning in the 1860s when limestone was used as a purifying flux in many small iron-making operations. Today the Port Inland quarry of Michigan Limestone Operations ships millions of tons of limestone from its port near Seul Choix Point east of Manistique to steelmaking centers on the lower Great Lakes.

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