Fayette: the ghost town Delta County kept perfect

At the end of Delta County’s Garden Peninsula, on a horseshoe harbor backed by white limestone cliffs, stands a whole town that time politely skipped: Fayette, the iron-smelting company town that boomed from 1867 to 1891 and then simply stopped. Instead of rotting away, it became Fayette Historic State Park — twenty-some preserved buildings, from the towering furnace complex to the hotel, opera house, and supervisor’s house, arranged exactly as workers left them, with Snail Shell Harbor’s clear green water lapping at the old dock pilings. It is, by broad agreement, the best ghost town east of the Mississippi.

Fayette crowns a county that quietly owns the U.P.’s gentlest side: Escanaba and Gladstone’s sandy Lake Michigan beaches and marinas (warm-water swimming, in the Upper Peninsula), the Stonington Peninsula’s lighthouse and famous fall monarch-butterfly gatherings, and the U.P. State Fair every August in Escanaba — the peninsula’s only state fair. Delta is where the U.P. meets the beach, with an 1880s time capsule for a bonus.