Pequaming, the town Henry Ford bought

A few miles north of L’Anse, a narrow finger of land reaches out into Keweenaw Bay — shaped, locals will tell you, like a bear, with its head, legs, and tail traced out along the shoreline. This is Pequaming, and its Ojibwe name, Pequaquawaming, simply meant “the headland.” It was an Indigenous settlement first, then in the 1870s a lumber company built a sawmill here and a whole town grew up around it: houses, churches, schools, a hall, all built to keep workers close to the mill.

Then, in 1923, Henry Ford bought the entire town. Ford wanted the surrounding hardwood forest — tens of thousands of acres of it — to make the wooden frames, floorboards, and bodies of his automobiles, and the family that owned Pequaming insisted he take the town along with the timber. Ford did, and turned it into one of his model company towns: he raised the workers’ pay, rebuilt and repainted the houses, added a school, and kept the old owners’ grand bungalow on the bay as his own summer home. For two decades the mill hummed, sending Baraga County wood south to the assembly lines.

It didn’t last. As cars used less and less wood and the Depression and war disrupted shipping, Ford closed the Pequaming mill in 1942, and the town slowly emptied. Today Pequaming is one of the largest and most atmospheric ghost towns in the Upper Peninsula — the water tower, the old company store, the bungalow, scattered houses, and the bones of the mill still standing on that bear-shaped point, with the bay lapping quietly all around. It’s a haunting, beautiful place to wander and imagine the town that was.