Munising's furnace, tannery, and paper mill

Long before there was a town here, there was the name. Munising comes from the Ojibwe word minisiing — “at the island” — for Grand Island, just offshore. Ojibwe and Noquet people lived along this bay for thousands of years, fishing its waters and gathering blueberries on the grasslands across from the island, and the town that grew up here simply took the name the place already had.

The first Munising was an iron town. In 1867 the Schoolcraft Iron Company fired up a blast furnace near Munising Falls, built with stone quarried on Grand Island, and a small settlement sprang up around it. The furnace turned out as much as twenty tons of iron a day at its peak, but the company’s fortunes didn’t last — the works failed in 1877, and the little town faded with it. Munising got its second start in 1895, when a new railroad reached the bay and the modern town took shape on the waterfront, soon joined by a huge leather tannery and, in 1904, a paper mill. The tannery is long gone, but the paper mill is still running more than a century later — one of the oldest working industries in the Upper Peninsula.

You can still find traces of the first Munising: the old furnace site near Munising Falls is on the National Register of Historic Places, and the Alger County Heritage Center in town keeps the area’s story alive.