Escanaba: ore docks, a lighthouse, and the U.P.'s own fair

Even Escanaba’s name is a story with two endings. It comes from the Ojibwe name for the river, but what it means is honestly disputed: the town’s founder said he’d been told it meant “flat rock,” while others have always maintained it means “land of the red buck,” for the famous deer grounds that drew Native hunters here from far away. Either way, the water made the town. When the railroad reached Little Bay de Noc in 1864, iron ore from the U.P.’s mines began pouring through Escanaba’s docks to feed the mills of the lower lakes — at one point six ore docks lined the harbor, and in the 1890s the port is said to have led the world in iron-ore shipments.

A busy harbor needed a light, and Sand Point Lighthouse carries one of the most quietly remarkable stories in town. Its first keeper, John Terry, died before the lamp was ever lit, and the town backed his widow Mary to take the post — one of the first women lighthouse keepers on the Great Lakes. She first lit the light in May 1868 and kept it faithfully for eighteen years, until she died in a fire at the lighthouse in 1886, a loss the town never forgot. The light served until 1939; today the restored lighthouse stands in Ludington Park as a museum of the Delta County Historical Society, its red light shining over the bay once more.

And every August, Escanaba throws the Upper Peninsula’s biggest party. The U.P. State Fair has run here since 1928, and when the state stopped funding its fairs in 2010 — a cut that ended the old Detroit state fair — all fifteen U.P. counties and the Hannahville Indian Community banded together to keep this one alive, making it for years afterward the only state fair in Michigan. More than eighty thousand people still come through the gates each summer. You can visit the lighthouse and museum through deltahistorical.org.