Sault Ste. Marie and the Soo Locks

Sault Ste. Marie — “the Soo” — is the oldest city in Michigan, and one of the oldest in the whole country. Long before any city, this spot on the St. Marys River was a gathering place for Native people for thousands of years; the Ojibwe knew it as Bahweting, “the gathering place,” drawn by the world-class fishing in the rapids. French missionaries arrived in the 1600s, and in 1668 Father Jacques Marquette gave the settlement its lasting name, after the Virgin Mary. The river here is the only water connection between Lake Superior and the rest of the Great Lakes — and that single fact has shaped everything about the place.

The problem the river poses is a drop: Lake Superior sits about twenty-one feet higher than Lake Huron, and the water tumbles down through rapids that boats simply could not climb. For centuries, travelers had to portage their canoes around the rapids. Then, in 1855, the first lock was built to lift and lower ships past the drop, and the Soo Locks were born. Operated today by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, the locks work by simple gravity — a ship enters a chamber, the gates close, and water is let in or out to raise or lower it to the next lake’s level. Watching a thousand-foot freighter rise or sink in the lock is the great free spectacle of the Sault, and there’s a visitor center built right alongside to watch from.

Here’s why the Soo Locks matter far beyond Michigan: they are the busiest lock system in the world by the tonnage of cargo that passes through them — on the order of eighty million tons a year. Nearly all of it is the raw material of industry, and a huge share is iron ore. Every freighter carrying taconite pellets out of Marquette or the Minnesota ranges, bound for the steel mills of the lower lakes, has to pass through these locks. The Sault is small and far north, but for a century and a half it has been one of the most important chokepoints in North American shipping — the doorway through which the Upper Peninsula’s iron has reached the world.