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Hunts' Guide to Michigan's UPPER PENINSULA

JUST OUT! A new edition of Hunts' Mapguide to Michigan's Upper Peninsula. Over 300 entries, all conveniently located on maps and chosen because we think they are the coolest things to do in the U.P. (No ad tie-ins!) Great choices for restaurants, hikes, shops, adventures, museums, boat trips, waterfalls, vistas, road trips, and much more! To learn more click UP MAP GUIDE

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MARQUETTE
POINTS
OF INTEREST

Downtown Marquette. A major U.P. destination for people who like to shop, nibble, drink coffee, dine, and explore interesting downtowns. Stroll past ornate buildings, a historic hotel, many restaurants, a classic department store, an 1883 saloon ... more

Marquette County History Museum. Choice artifacts, some life-sized exhibits with audio, and a good gift shop make this stand out. See an Ojibwa family group,the Burt survey party, a child-scale street of shops ... more

Peter White Library. A dream library renovated and expanded through community visioning: restored 1904 reading rooms, an exhibit gallery, a children's room designed by kids, a community art gallery and shop, and a café/coffee bar with fresh Greek specialties ... more

Beaumier U.P. Heritage Center . At the Beaumier U.P. Heritage Center are exhibits on the various immigrant groups who populated the U.P., an historical look at student life at Northern Michigan University, and the artifacts from the life of philanthropist and business magnate Sam Cohodas. ... more

Greywalls Golf Course. One of Michigan's finest and arguably its visually most dramatic course, Greywalls attracts golfers from across the nation ... more

Ridge and Arch Historic District. A well-maintained neighborhood of historic homes in a variety of late 19th-century styles, and two richly detailed red sandstone churches with unusual stained glass windows, one by Tiffany ... more

Lower Harbor. The beautifully designed focus of the city's Lake Superior waterfront, with a fresh and smoked fish shop, a playground/picnic park next to the marina, a historic lighthouse, a breakwall to walk out on ... more

Marquette Maritime Museum. A colorful museum with lots of great stuff: superb replicas of freighters, three Fresnel lighthouse lenses, hands-on fishing nets and a pilot house, colorful flags from Great Lakes freighters, a miniature reconstruction of a famous WWII naval battle ... more

U.S.S. Darter-Dace Silent Service Memorial. A fascinating computerized, narrated diorama of the Philippine naval battle that crippled the Japanese navy, highlighting the critical role of two subs with U.P. crews and a replica conning tower are part ... more

Marquette Harbor Light. Visitors can now tour this oft-photographed lighthouse on the rocks and take the catwalk 300' out to Lighthouse Point, with great panoramic views of Presque Isle, ore dock, harbor, and town ... more

Lakeside bike path from the Inner Harbor to Presque Isle. You can rent a bike or rollerblades for this beautiful, busy shoreline path from the inner harbor to magical Presque Isle Park, passing a beach and picnic area for students and one for families ... more

Lake Superior & Ishpeming RR Ore Dock. Extending a full quarter mile out into the lake, this huge 75' landmark is where you can watch taconite pellets of iron ore delivered by train and noisily dumped into a waiting ore carrier ... more

The STUDIO Gallery at Presque Isle. Ten respected artists display their paintings, jewelry, and welded garden sculptures, gates, and hangings here at their gallery and working studio ... more

Moosewood Nature Center. Started by science teachers, the enthusiastic young staff offers 20 programs and outings a month for families and has some live native reptiles and amphibians to watch. A paved Bog Walk Trail is outside ... more

Presque Isle Park. One of the coolest city parks anywhere, it's a rocky, wooded peninsula jutting into Lake Superior with great vistas, 5 miles of walking paths, swimming pool and water slide, picnic grounds, bandshell ... more

The Village shopping district on Third Street. Between downtown and campus, Third Street has several popular restaurants; an excellent outdoors shop with stylish and functional outerwear; Scandinavian crystal, jewelry, and textiles ... more

Superior Dome. See the wood framework of the world's largest wood dome, used for athletics and community walking and jogging. Interesting exhibits in its outer corridor feature U.P. minerals, ethnic groups, and Upper Peninsula legends John Voelker, Dominic Jacobetti, Nita Engle, Glenn Seaborg, and Sam Cohodas ... more

DeVos Art Museum at Northern Michigan University. With this facility, the Upper Peninsula has a real art museum, open year-round, with some high-level nationally important exhibits along with local and regional shows ... more

Father Marquette Park/ Chamber of Commerce.. Tourist info with a grand view of a picture-perfect town, harbor, and lighthouse ... more

Marquette County Courthouse. A grand public building from 1902, used with respect. See the impressive courtroom where the Anatomy of a Murder case was tried, the great view from the steps, and the display of Voelker legal memorabilia ... more

St. Peter Cathedral and Baraga Archives. In the cathedral, stained glass windows of saints and scenes from Jesus's life. Next door, the papers of the snowshoe priest from Slovenia involved with the early history of many Michigan communities ... more

Upper Peninsula Children's Museum. Low-tech, free wheeling, imaginative fun in a whacky micro city, a recyclatorium, and a great gift shop. Kids learn about microbiology after sliding down a toilet, fly in a real fuselage cockpit ... more

Marquette Food Co-op. Cheerful one-stop shopping with good produce and more trail mixes, energy bars, soy milk and juices for travelers in the attractive new location downtown ... more

Park Cemetery. Download WMOT deejay Jim Koski's chatty Park Cemetery walking tour and a stroll through this hilly, wooded cemetery becomes a guided tour of the graves of Marquette's founding elite ... more

Jilbert's Dairy. An ice cream parlor is the centerpiece of this headquarters complex of the U.P.'s premier dairy, where you can see milk being processed, picnic next to a giant cow, and shop for various U.P. foods and knick-knacks ... more

Brewmaster's Castle Home. The exterior is exotic, but get a look at what's inside ... more

Mount Marquette Scenic Lookout. A rocky summit provides a glorious views of the city, the bay, and the vast expanse of Lake Superior beyond ... more

Marquette Branch Prison. The 1889 part of the prison that looks like it's out of Victorian England, with pretty inmate-tended flower gardens out front ... more

U.S. 41 road cut with ancient algal stromatolites. Looming above Highway 41, this rocky cliff reveals eroded remains of ancient (2 billion-year-old) mountains once far higher than today's Rockies ... more

Michigan Welcome Center. The picnic area provides a striking view of Marquette Bay and the distant city of Marquette, with helpful tourist info in the log Welcome Center ... more

Blueberry Ridge Cross-Country Ski Trail/Escanaba River State Forest. 12K of trails, 1.7 miles of them lighted, are groomed for ski-skating and diagonal stride ... more

Lakenenland. One of the U.P.'s most unusual roadside attractions, a pipefitter's quirky sculpture park. Part political, part fanciful, done just for fun. No fee, nothing to buy. ... more

MARQUETTE

St. Peter Cathedral and Baraga Archives

The twin towers of St. Peter's Cathedral are a Marquette landmark. The church is home base for the Diocese of Marquette, ministering to the Upper Peninsula's 68,000 Catholics. Completed in 1890, rebuilt in part in 1935 after a fire, Its beautiful interior can be visited on weekdays and during several Masses.

In designing and later in remodeling this splendid church, Marquette Catholics and their bishop wanted to make a strong architectural statement to counterbalance the unusually large and elegant St. Paul's Episcopal Church on the northside hill at Ridge and Arch, the neighborhood of Marquette's Protestant elite. Here on the south side was where early immigrants lived, including Irish and German Catholics. Building the twin-towered Romanesque cathedral took ten years before completion in 1890. It and the nearby courthouse, conspicuously sited on a hill surveying the town, form a memorable southern skyline.

The church was rebuilt in part in 1935, after a fire. The beautiful interior may be visited weekdays. A simple wall treatment shows off the stained glass windows and woodwork. Windows depict the Mysteries of the Rosary (to the right) and saints and scenes from the life of Christ and the Church (to the left). The three windows at the back of the Cathedral, over the choir loft, contain four single figures of the musical saints: St. Cecilia, St. David, St. Ambrose & St. Gregory.

A side chapel is devoted to Perpetual Eucharistic Adoration, a traditional form of prayer promoted by Pope John Paul II as a powerful way of establishing peace on earth. An elaborate schedule of volunteers insures that the rosary is prayed around-the-clock in the presence of the consecrated host. See www.stpetercathedral.org for cathedral and parish history and architecture.

Today the Diocese of Marquette numbers 68,000 - a sign of the size of the longtime French-Canadian and Indian populations and the more recent immigration from Catholic countries: many Italians, Germans, Slovenians, and Croatians who came to work in the mines, the occasional Lebanese, plus of course those in the great Irish diaspora, scattered everywhere in North America. Many Potato Famine refugees first came to work on the first Soo Locks. Others fished and became merchants. Some Irish also mined and became involved in law, business, and politics.

The Upper Peninsula's mid-19th-century bishop, Frederic Baraga, moved the diocesean headquarters from Sault Ste. Marie to Marquette in 1864. Today the Bishop Baraga Association is working to canonize the celebrated "snowshoe priest" who came from Slovenia (the northernmost of the former Yugoslav states) to minister to native peoples on the northwoods frontier. The missions founded by early missionaries like Baraga and Samuel Mazzuchelli, his counterpart on the Upper Mississippi, and the Jesuits before them, formed many of the earliest permanent settlements in their regions. (Baraga did not belong to the Jesuits or any other order, but was a diocesan priest.)

Baraga arrived in the U.S. in 1830, worked at the existing Arbre Croche (Harbor Springs) mission, started the Grand River mission that became Grand Rapids in 1833, and moved on to the LaPointe (Apostle Islands) mission from 1835 to around 1843. He then started his last mission at Assinins near L'Anse, from which he traveled on snowshoes to emerging settlements as far north as Eagle Harbor near the Keweenaw Peninsula's tip. In 1853 he was named bishop of the new Marquette Diocese, then based in Sault Ste. Marie. In the 1850s mining shifted the center of the Upper Peninsula's population west, leading Bishop Baraga to move the seat of the diocese to Marquette in 1865. He lived here for two years until his death.

While at Assinins Father Baraga authored the first dictionary of the Ojibwa language, still in use, and worked to promote temperance - abstinence, in fact - among Indians. "No Indian missionary of modern times was more beloved and revered by both Indians and whites than Baraga," states the 1907 biography of Bishop Baraga in the Catholic Encyclopedia, online at www.newadvent.org (The Catholic Encyclopedia is a relevant, useful Upper Peninsula reference, because Catholics figured so prominently in the area's early written history.) "He loved his Indians with a warm-hearted devotion which they reciprocated. Men of all positions in society, Catholics and non-Catholics, revered him as an ideal man, Christian, and bishop. In his native country he is, if possible, even more popular than in America. His Slovenian prayerbook for the common man, Dusha Pasa, sold over 85,000 copies in 11 editions. That life might be summed up in the one phrase: Saintliness in action." Missionary institutions are certainly known to glow over their positive effects and gloss over the negatives, but in Father Baraga's case, the high praise has stood the test of time and seems true today. He bought land for Ojibwa at Assinins, helping in this and other ways to keep them from being moved west by the U.S. government.

Attaining sainthood in today's Roman Catholic Church is no easy matter, however. It requires proof of two miracles - miracles that must be instantaneous, permanent, and without medical explanation. "In his time, people thought of Baraga as a saint," says Elizabeth Delene, the enthusiastic historian and archivist who is the association's director. Many infirm people who have recently prayed to him to intercede for a miracle attribute their improvement to his help. Still, she says, "it's difficult to say that a chemical or drug didn't help." Visitors can schedule a guided tour of the Baraga crypt (a simple marble room in the cathedral's lower level where many bishops are interred) and archive.

Decades after Baraga's death, hundreds of thousands of Slovenes immigrated to the Great Lakes area and worked in mines and factories. In 1930 Slovenian-American Joseph Gregorich moved to Marquette from Oak Park, Illinois to advance Baraga's cause. His voluminous collections form the basis of the Baraga Archive, open to any researcher. To set up and appointment and learn about relevant materials to each research project, call or e-mail director Elizabeth Delene at (906) 227-9117 or edelene@dioceseofmarquette.org His letters (some 800 written by him, and 1,000 written to him) also convey a lot about Upper Peninsula life and connections with Catholic societies in Europe. Other holdings include fur company papers and Office of Indian Affairs records, plus the expected church and parish histories.

The cathedral is at 311 W. Baraga at Fourth. Baraga intersects with Front/BR 41 just south of downtown. (906) 226-6548. The church is open daily. Mass is at 8 a.m. and 5:15 p.m weekdays, Sat 4 p.m., Sun 8 a.m., 10 a.m., 11:30 a.m. and 6 p.m. Church is handicap accessible. The Baraga Archives are at 347 Rock, behind the church, entered from parking lot. Not wheelchair-accessible. (906) 227-9117. Open by appointment.

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