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SAULT STE. MARIE, MICHIGAN
POINTS
OF
INTEREST
Soo Locks Park & Visitor Center. This is the place to get really close-up views of giant freighters, plus see some interesting exhibits ...
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Soo Lock Train Tours. Great intro to Soo. Smart, funny 1-hour narrated tour of historic sites. From International Bridge, look down 135' on all 5 locks. ...
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Soo Locks Boat Tour. This 2-hour excursion provides a dramatic look at the big locks, the quaint Canadian locks, and the Twin Soo's waterfronts. ...
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River of History Museum. Compelling life-size dioramas bring to life scenes from Sault Ste. Marie's long history and prehistory. ...
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Riverfront walk along Water Street and Brady Park. See upbound boats waiting at the locks at beautiful Brady Park, site of the 19th c. fort. See interesting historic monuments from Sault Ste. Marie's aspiring years, including idiosyncratic Chase Osborn, the only U.P. governor. ...
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Bingham Avenue historic buildings. An avenue of grand 19th-century buildings, from a time when locals saw a grander future for the city than actually unfolded ...
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Tower of History. An oustanding geographical of the area from a 21-story tower. ...
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St. Mary's Pro-cathedral. This 1880s cathedral has a wonderful interior, with richly colored stained glass and striking wall accents ...
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Schoolcraft, Johnston and Baraga houses. Three of the earliest and most significant houses in Upper Peninsula history ...
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George Kemp Downtown Marina
. A nice picnic area at a beautiful marina ...
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Museum Ship Valley Camp . A 1917 Great Lakes steamship is the vehicle for an interesting maritime museum ...
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St. Mary's River Lighthouse Cruise. A 4-hour journey past landmarks like the lighthouse at the entrance to the St. Marys River ...
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Edison Sault Power Plant & Alford Park. This 1902 quarter-mile-long landmark never attracted the industries it was built to serve, but still generates electricity ...
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Mission Point, Aune Osborn Park & Sugar Island Ferry. It's been called the #1 place anywhere to see Great Lakes freighters in motion ...
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Sugar Island. Once a favorite Chippewa sugaring spot, the island still has many maples and still is a popular stop for migrating birds ...
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New Fort Brady/Lake Superior State University. Begun in 1893 as an Army fort and barracks for 20,000 troops, this overlook now is the site of 3,300-student Lake Superior State University ...
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International Bridge. Connecting the 5,000-mile Trans-Canada Highway with 2,000-mile I-75 to Florida, this 1962 bridge does much more than connect the two Soos ...
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Schoolcraft, Johnston and Baraga houses
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Three of the earliest and most significant houses in Upper Peninsula history have been moved to Water Street to avoid demolition on their original sites. They are just west of the Valley Camp and George Kemp marina. The nonprofit Le Sault de Ste. Marie Historic Sites owns them and is looking for grants to complete their restoration. Eventually the organization would like to have them open as a sort of living history, akin to the Ermatinger-Clergue site in the Canadian Sault Ste. Marie.
One plaque identifies the surviving portion of the JOHN JOHNSTON HOUSE, the simple dormered cottage of the important British-American fur trader. The Michigan Historican Marker in front succinctly explains his significance. It states, "A native of Ireland and a Protestant, John Johnston (1762-1828) arrived on the Lake Superior frontier in the early 1790s. He married the daughter of a powerful Chippewa chief and settled here in 1793. Johnston's knowledge of the Chippewa and the Great Lakes region made him a central figure in the development of this frontier. His original house [at 415 Park Place] was a hospitable meeting place for explorers, surveyors, trappers, traders and Indians. Loyal to the British, Johnston aided them in taking the American fort on Mackinac Island in 1812. In retaliation, American troops burned Johnston's house in 1815. He soon rebuilt it. This surviving portion erected about 1822, in part to house his daughter Jane and her husband, Henry Rowe Schoolcraft, is a reminder of Johnston's pivotal role in the area's transition from British to American control."
Traveling Through Time: A Guide to Michigan's Historical Markers, edited by Laura Ashlee, is again in print, now published by the University of Michigan Press. It consists of the texts of Michigan Historical markers, through 1990 or so and includes the Johnston marker. People who take Michigan Historic Markers and the process for vetting them for granted should be aware that James Loewen called them the nation's most accurate in his muckraking Lies Across the Landscape: What Our Historic Sites Get Wrong.
Today the cottage's surviving portion has been restored to the point where it is open to the public, with furnishings from the era. The house's piece-on-piece French log construction will interest some. Kathryn Eckert describes it in the Michilimackinac part of Buildings of Michigan: "Unhewn uprights [were] set into a ditch to anchor the buildling to the ground. Heavy uprights were placed at 6-foot intervals in the walls and at the corner, with the interstices between them filled with less substantial logs [cedar in this case]."
But the most interesting aspect of the Johnston house in summer of 2005 will be Susan Askwith and David Stanaway's songs and stories about the Johnston family, held at 11 and 1 on Tuesday and Thursday in July and August. They dress in costume. Peter DeCourey, a star of the local theater scene, plays John Johnston with a credible Irish accent at the Chippewa County Historical Society fundraiser August 19 and 20. See the calendar at www.saultstemarie.com
The BISHOP BARAGA HOUSE is the small, two-story house built by the famous missionary and "Snowshoe Priest" when the Upper Peninsula's Roman Catholic diocese was in Sault Ste. Marie, before he moved it to Marquette in 1864. The Baraga House is still mothballed.
ELMWOOD, the Federal-style headquarters of U.S. Indian Agent Henry Rowe Schoolcraft, is where he collected materials for his books of Ojibwa legends that Longfellow drew upon for his wildly popular narrative poem Hiawatha. Elmwood's main house and connecting wings formed the center of Indian affairs for the Upper Great Lakes from 1827, when it was finished, until 1833, when the Indian Agency was moved to Mackinac Island.
The energetic, opinionated Schoolcraft, an explorer, scholar, administrator, and self-promoter, was a key figure in Michigan's territorial era. To help assess the area's possibilities and advise on negotiating treaties with Indians, he went on expeditions as far as the headwaters of the Mississippi
Here in Sault Ste. Marie, Schoolcraft met and married Jane Johnston, the bright, pretty daughter of the area's most important fur trader and his Ojibwa wife. Jane passed along the legends and stories that became the basis of Hiawatha. Despite Schoolcraft's status in literature and Michigan history, he's no local favorite. "He lied like a trooper," said the late Yvonne Hogue-Peer, Native American genealogist, granddaughter of chiefs (she's also descended from 17th-century Scottish immigrants), and past vice-president of the Chippewa County Historical Society. "He was self-taught. He had an inferiority complex. And he was out to impress. He made up a lot. Neither white nor Indian historians here like him because they don't know what to believe. He could have been an outstanding ethnologist because he had so much material to work with."
Schoolcraft's credibility was affected, it's widely agreed, by his dislike of Indians and his desire to moralize about their lack of ambition. Indians weren't allowed inside his mansion. When his wife's relations had to spend the night, according to oral tradition corroborated by physical evidence, they stayed in a pit dug under the house. Jane's considerable abilities as a storyteller and cultural interpreter went unacknowledged. (Schoolcraft himself did no field work.)
Schoolcraft was no kinder to others. Eager to hog the limelight, he misled the young botanist who went along on his expedition and wanted to write a joint account of the trip. He belittled George Catlin, the early painter of Native American cultures. And he publicly humiliated Bishop Baraga.
Schoolcraft designed Elmwood as a grand mansion for his residence and office. On its original site in a grove of spruces it faced the river. Its elegant elliptical windows and fanlights can be seen if you walk around to the back. "Nothing matched it in the whole territory of Michigan," says Lake Superior State University history professor Bob Money, who worked for decades to research, save, and move the house. "Schoolcraft always had his eye on greatness. He had to have a house larger than his father-in-law's."
Now in 2005 Schoolcraft's office is open to the public. It has been recreated with furniture, geology specimens, and Native American artifacts that suit what local historians believe could have been in his Indian Agency.
The veranda was a hundred feet long, and the house and its furnishings elegant beyond anything else on the Upper Great Lakes. Elmwood was the center of social life in Sault Ste. Marie when winter cut off from the world the village and Fort Brady. The long winters help account for Schoolcraft's prodigious literary output here.
Later Charles Harvey stayed at Elmwood when he was superintending the first locks' construction. A lumber baron bought Elmwood from the federal government and remodeled it beyond recognition into a Queen Anne mansion, full of picturesque gables and chimneys. Dogged history professor Bob Money followed his hunch that the Victorian showplace concealed Schoolcraft's late Federal house. When expansion by the Edison Sault power plant threatened to demolish it, a generous and careful builder helped the grassroots preservation group move it. The electric company wouldn't drop its electric lines to aid in this important preservation project, so the house was floated in two pieces on a barge to its present location!
The Chippewa County Historical Society would appreciate any kind of donation—especially big ones!—to make up the matching portion of any grants that might come its way in these difficult times.
The houses are on Water Street just west of the Valley Camp and George Kemp marina. Water Street parallels Portage, a block to the north. From Portage, take Bingham or Johnston to Water. Open from June 15 through Labor Day, Mon-Sat 10-5, Sun noon to 5. No fee. Donations greatly appreciated. (906) 635-7082. Wheelchair-accessible: downstairs of Johnston House. Schoolcraft office in process.
Return to Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan
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