The French fishing villages at the end of the Garden Peninsula

The Garden Peninsula points twenty-two miles down into Lake Michigan like a long finger. At its very tip are two tiny places, Sac Bay and Fairport, that owe their existence to fish. French fishermen had settled on the islands scattered south of the peninsula, drawn by how thick the whitefish and trout ran in the Bays de Noc. In the 1850s some gave up island life and rowed their nets to the mainland. They founded Sac Bay and Fairport so they could keep working the same water with solid ground under their houses.

That fishing trade is the older story here — older than the iron furnaces at Fayette up the same shore, which didn’t fire until 1867. The peninsula sits on the Niagara Escarpment, the band of hard limestone that arcs all the way to Niagara Falls. That white rock shows up everywhere: in the cliffs, in the old quarries, and as the flux the Fayette furnaces burned to purify their iron. The village of Garden, the biggest settlement out here, grew up inland of the fishing hamlets as the farming and logging center.

Commercial fishing, farming, logging, tourism — each took its turn, and none ever made the peninsula crowded. Fairport still launches boats at the bottom of the peninsula, about as far as a paved road will carry you in this part of Michigan. Stand on the dock there and the islands the first French families left are right out front, low and green across the water — the same view that started the whole place.