Meet Me U.P. North

Meet Me U.P. North Stories, memories & history from Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. 🌲 Exploring the people, places & moments that shaped the U.P.

Historical research paired with AI-assisted artistic recreations to help bring the past to life.

Out at the very end of the Stonington Peninsula, past the cedars and the gravel road, a little brick lighthouse from 186...
09/07/2026

Out at the very end of the Stonington Peninsula, past the cedars and the gravel road, a little brick lighthouse from 1865 still marks the spot where the two Bays de Noc meet. 🗼

The light was retired back in 1936, but the tower never came down. You can still climb the iron spiral stairs to the top for one of the finest views in Delta County, water on three sides and the whole sweep of Green Bay laid out below. 🌅

And every fall something quiet and wonderful happens out there. Thousands of monarch butterflies pile up on the point, resting in the trees, waiting for the right wind to carry them south across the water. Folks around here call it our own little Point Pelee. 🦋

09/07/2026

Every so often Lake Superior does something that resets the whole scale. The winter of 2013 and 2014 was one of those. ❄️

On March 19, 2014, ice covered 95.3 percent of Lake Superior, and two weeks earlier the five Great Lakes together hit 92.2 percent, a number the basin had not seen since the winter of 1978 and 1979. Freighters ran behind schedule. From shore the lake looked like a plain, with pressure ridges standing up where the plates had shoved into each other. 🚢

Then it would not let go. The lake was still carrying ice on June 3, and boaters were photographing chunks of it into the second week of June, with the water sitting in the 30s while the air onshore hit the 80s. Some winters you tell stories about. That one the lake kept its own record of. 💙

When Peter White first stepped ashore where Marquette now stands, in the summer of 1849, he was a teenager and the place...
09/06/2026

When Peter White first stepped ashore where Marquette now stands, in the summer of 1849, he was a teenager and the place was little more than timber and a rocky shore. 🌲

He never really left. Over the next sixty years he became the town's banker, its postmaster, a state legislator and, more than anything, the man who seemed to have a hand in whatever the young city needed built. He helped haul iron out to the world and then poured a good share of it back into the place that made him. 🪨

His fingerprints are still all over Marquette. The grand sandstone library downtown carries his name because he filled its first shelves himself, and the park out on the point stayed public in large part because he fought for it. Not bad for a kid who showed up with nothing. 💙

She was one of the newest boats on the lakes, barely off the builder's ways, when Lake Superior took her. 🌊The steamer C...
09/06/2026

She was one of the newest boats on the lakes, barely off the builder's ways, when Lake Superior took her. 🌊

The steamer Cyprus was hauling iron ore when a gale caught her off Deer Park on October 11, 1907. She had been in service only a few weeks. Of the 23 men aboard, only one lived, the second mate, who was carried ashore half frozen within sight of the life-saving station and lived to tell what happened. The other 22 were lost. 🕯️

It was a hard reminder that a brand new ship and a fair morning mean nothing when the big seas come early. The wreck was found decades later, resting deep and upright on the bottom. 💙

A few miles down the shore from Whitefish Point, the woods are slowly taking back a town that once ran on sawdust and st...
09/06/2026

A few miles down the shore from Whitefish Point, the woods are slowly taking back a town that once ran on sawdust and steam. 🌲

Shelldrake got its start in 1895, when a couple of brothers from downstate set up a sawmill at the mouth of the Shelldrake River and began turning the great pine of the Tahquamenon country into lumber. For a while it had everything a Lake Superior mill town needed, houses and a school, a store, a post office and a hospital, and it changed hands more than once as the big companies moved in. 🪓

Then the pine ran thin and the mill burned, more than once, and by the 1920s the work was gone. It passed into private hands and never became anything else, so a handful of weathered original buildings still stand out there by the bay, quiet as can be. 🤍

Take a frozen sheet of ice, a rubber ball, a bunch of people in boots swinging brooms, and no skates allowed. That is br...
09/06/2026

Take a frozen sheet of ice, a rubber ball, a bunch of people in boots swinging brooms, and no skates allowed. That is broomball, and up here it is practically a rite of passage. 🥅

It gets played on outdoor rinks and church lots all over the U.P., but nowhere harder than up in Houghton, where the college has grown one of the biggest broomball programs anywhere and games run late into winter nights. You slide, you fall, you get right back up, because standing still is how you end up on your back anyway. ❄️

No fancy gear, no big crowds. Just cold air, sore hips and a whole lot of laughing. 😄

09/06/2026

There was a time when you could get on a train in Sault Ste. Marie and ride all the way to Duluth without ever leaving one railroad. 🚂

They called it the South Shore, for the obvious reason. The Duluth, South Shore and Atlantic ran east to west across the top of Michigan, out of the Soo and out of the Straits, through Marquette and the Copper Country and on into Wisconsin and Minnesota. Canadian Pacific took control in 1888 and used it as a bridge to the American end of Lake Superior. At its peak in 1911 the company worked 623 miles of railroad, 517 of it main line, hauling iron ore, copper, lumber, mail and people through country that had no other reliable way out in winter. ❄️

The end came the way it came for a lot of railroads. The Mackinac Bridge opened in 1957, and the last South Shore passenger train ran in January 1958. In 1961 the company was folded into the Soo Line and the name came off the timetables. A good deal of the old grade is still out there under the ferns, and some of it you have probably walked without knowing whose railroad it once was. 🌲

South of Houghton, in the little location town of Painesdale, one of the last great shaft-rockhouses of the Copper Count...
09/06/2026

South of Houghton, in the little location town of Painesdale, one of the last great shaft-rockhouses of the Copper Country still stands against the sky. ⛏️

The Copper Range Company opened the Champion Mine here around the turn of the last century, and the No. 4 shaft became one of its workhorses, sending men and rock up and down through the poor rock and the copper for decades. When the mine finally closed in 1967, it took a way of life with it, the whistle that set the day and the paychecks that built the town. 🪨

Most of these structures were scrapped long ago. This one was saved by local people who would not let it go, and today you can still tour the shaft-rockhouse where their fathers and grandfathers went underground. 🌲

If you have ever driven US-41 through L'Anse, you know the rule. You do not pass the Hilltop without stopping for a swee...
09/06/2026

If you have ever driven US-41 through L'Anse, you know the rule. You do not pass the Hilltop without stopping for a sweet roll. 🥮

They are famous for a reason. The things come out of the oven about the size of a small hubcap, warm and gooey and frosted, and one of them can just about founder a grown logger. Generations of travelers have made that hill their halfway point, the reward for getting that far north or the send-off before the long haul home. ☕

Some folks order one to eat and one for the road. Nobody has ever ordered one and finished it in a hurry. 😄

Some lights were built to welcome ships in. This one was built to keep them off the rocks. 🌊The Au Sable Light Station w...
09/06/2026

Some lights were built to welcome ships in. This one was built to keep them off the rocks. 🌊

The Au Sable Light Station went up in 1874 on a lonely point west of Grand Marais, guarding a long sandstone reef that runs almost a mile out under Lake Superior and sits just a few feet below the surface in places. That stretch of shore wrecked so many vessels that mariners had their own grim name for it, and the tower was the government's answer. 🚢

For decades keepers and their families lived out there in real isolation, miles from the nearest town along what is now a quiet trail in Pictured Rocks. The light was automated in 1958, but the white tower and the old keeper's house still stand watch over that coast. 🤍

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