Eagle River and Eagle Harbor, two jewels on the shore

The shore road M-26 runs along the Keweenaw’s Lake Superior side past two of the prettiest little villages in the U.P., both barely more than a handful of buildings but rich with history. Eagle River, despite a year-round population you could count on your fingers and toes, is the county seat of Keweenaw County — the courthouse is here. It boomed in the 1840s when the Cliff Mine just inland made it a busy copper port; today it’s a quiet spot with a waterfall and dam, a historic timber-arch bridge, and a general store that’s been going since the 1860s.

Seven miles up the road, Eagle Harbor wraps around one of the only naturally protected harbors on this stretch of coast. Its red-brick lighthouse, built in 1871 and now a maritime museum, is one of the most photographed on Lake Superior, and the harbor has a sandy swimming beach — a rarity on this rocky shore.

There’s a deeper story in these waters, too. It was just off this shore, near Eagle River, that Douglass Houghton drowned in October 1845. Houghton was Michigan’s first state geologist, the man whose copper survey set off the rush that built everything you see in the Copper Country — and the man this county’s neighbor, Houghton County, is named for. Caught in a sudden Lake Superior storm in a small open boat, he was lost at just thirty-six; his body wasn’t found until the next spring. The same lake that made the Keweenaw rich has always demanded its due, and these beautiful, dangerous waters took one of Michigan’s brightest early figures.