How Gogebic County got its name

This far western corner of Michigan was Lake Superior Chippewa country long before it was a county, and the name it carries is an Ojibwe one. Gogebic comes from Lake Gogebic, the big lake in the county’s east, which was originally written Agogebic — and exactly what that word meant has been gently argued over for more than a century. The county’s own tradition holds that it means “a body of water hanging on high,” a fitting image for a lake that sits up in high country well above Lake Superior. An old 1884 source instead translated it as “water-mold lake.” Everyone agrees it’s Ojibwe; nobody can say for certain which meaning is right. That honest uncertainty is itself a kind of fitting tribute to the people who named it first — the Lake Superior Chippewa, whose Lac Vieux Desert community still has its home in the county today, down at Watersmeet.

The county came late and came from iron. This land was part of Ontonagon County until the Gogebic Iron Range boom of the 1880s filled it with mining towns almost overnight, and in 1887 the state set Gogebic off as its own county. The boundary lines were drawn around mines, not lakes, but the name reached east to the great lake on the county’s edge for something more lasting than any ore body.

Bessemer became the county seat — itself a mining name, after the Bessemer steel process that the range’s iron helped feed. Today the mines are long quiet, but the name on the courthouse still speaks Ojibwe, pointing east to the water hanging on high.