MARQUETTE

Region: Marquette Range

This handsome city of 21,000 stands out in many ways. The restaurant scene here is far and away the best in the Upper Peninsula (see Marquette Restaurants). There are two outstanding bakeries—Huron Mountain Bakery and Marquette Baking Co. and delightful galleries like Risak Pottery and Studio Gallery. Bustling Downtown Marquette has an architectural and commercial heft that makes it a grand place to stroll.

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There's a lively shopping scene both downtown and along the long, busy commercial strip through which hurried traffic travels on US-41. Amenities uncommon for a city this size abound: unforgettable Greywalls Golf Course, the terrific Marquette Food Co-op, dramatic Presque Isle Park, impressive Upper Peninsula Children's Museum, the delightful 5-mile-long Lakeside bike path from the Inner Harbor to Presque Isle, and popular Marquette Mountain ski slope. The city is even flanked by two big hills providing panoramic views: Mount Marquette Scenic Lookout and the top of the ski slope Marquette Mountain.
Money and ambition have fueled the Queen City for over a century and a half. The village quickly exploited the 1850s iron boom nearby, building rail lines to the mines to take ore to the long ore docks in its harbor. Locals promoted the city as a pleasant haven from the summer heat below, attracting numerous steamships carrying well-to-do vacationers to cottages, hotels, and resorts.

Even after the 1850s iron boom subsided in the 1870s, resourceful residents reached out to find more resources for growth. The Business Men's Association of Marquette successfully lobbied the state to locate Marquette Branch Prison just east of town.

A local businessman donated land that became the original campus of Northern Michigan University, which grew from a little teacher's college in 1899 to a school of over 9,300 students on a 360-acre campus north of the central city. Without NMU, Marquette would be a far less vibrant city. The high caliber of places like the Marquette Maritime Museum, and the Marquette Food-Co-op no doubt are a product of a lively university-town culture.

A further catalyst that has helped turn Marquette into an upscale, happening community has been the spectacular growth in recent decades of Marquette General Hospital. Now a $300+ million-a-year system serving most of the Upper Peninsula, it has created hundreds of professional jobs, fostering fine shops, restaurants, and museums.

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Jutting some 1,300 feet into Marquette Bay, the huge Lake Superior & Ishpeming RR Ore Dock receives iron ore by railroad from Cleveland-Cliffs' Empire Mine and Tilden Mine. Freighters take the ore to steel mills in the lower Great Lakes.

Downtown Marquette is anchored by the spectacular five-story Marquette County Savings Bank at Front and Washington with its granite columns and clock tower. Locally quarried sandstone gives Marquette buildings a look of stability and stature. Interesting shops line its main street, Washington. Even more specialty shops are scattered along Third east of the NMU campus. Just northeast of downtown, impressive historic homes occupy Ridge and Arch Historic District. Unlike most cities, Marquette has historically been lucky to own most of its waterfront. Today a decade of planning and visioning have paid off not only in the beautiful Mattson Park and marina at the Lower Harbor a block from downtown, but in well-designed (and quite successful) condo projects that complement pedestrian access to the waterfront.

The city is built in an area of rocky outcrops that at places create dramatic 100-foot-high formations and cliffs. It rises sharply from Lake Superior, affording beautiful views of Presque Isle Harbor and Marquette Bay. The vistas are punctuated by dramatic landmarks: the massive ore docks, the iconic historic red Marquette Harbor Light, Thill's Fish House, its fishing tug nestled along side it, and Presque Isle Park, whose craggy red rocks and tall pines jut out into Lake Superior.

To see a much larger version of this bird's-eye view of Marquette in 1897, click on Marquette 1897.

History. The natural crescent-shaped harbor at downtown's eastern edge is the reason for the town's location. In 1857 the first of a succession of long ore docks were built to ferry iron ore out to ships waiting in Marquette Bay. (The harbor is shallow, so the docks had to be long.) The ore docks are giant structures rising up above any ship; the ore trains that thunderously drop their loads into the dock pockets look small by comparison.

Iron loaded in Marquette played a major part in industrializing America. Today iron is still being shipped from Marquette. It takes three or four trains, each with 120 cars, to fill a typical ore freighter with 20,000 to 30,000 tons of taconite pellets, a concentrated form of iron ore. These pellets go to make steel in Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario, Cleveland, and Dearborn. Today only the northern dock off Lakeshore Boulevard is used. The ore dock downtown hasn't been used for decades.

Isolated from the rest of the country, Marquette nonetheless developed because of the money and influence of Easterners who began investing in the region in 1849. Its name commemorates the work and travels of Father Marquette in the early European history of Lake Superior. In 1855 the Soo Locks opened, dramatically lowering the price of Marquette Range iron shipped throughout the Great Lakes and beyond. The boom was on.

Don Hunt

Marvelous old buildings are sprinkled around Marquette's downtown, like thiis sandstone facade storefront on Washington, now home to Images Formal Wear.

Peter White joined as a teenager one of the first mining expeditions in the 1850s. He parlayed 12 years of knowledge gained as Marquette's first postmaster into a fortune by investing in timber mining rights and banking. White used his wealth to build myriad Marquette institutions, from hospitals and churches to Presque Isle Park and the city's handsome Peter White Library.

Marquette's business powers chose many of the leading architects of Detroit, Chicago, Milwaukee, and Cleveland to erect their impressive edifices, points out Kathryn Eckert in Buildings of Michigan. Architecture buffs admire its elaborate 19th-century churches, public and commercial buildings, and homes. Self-guided walking tours are available at the Marquette County History Museum.

In 2004 the semipublic Marquette Golf Club opened Greywalls Golf Course, so challenging, on such a gorgeous site with wetlands, a waterfall, lots of granite outcrops, and distant Lake Superior views, that it is helping turn the U.P. into a golfing destination.

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PLACES AROUND MARQUETTE TO

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