Newberry's iron and timber beginnings

Newberry didn’t exist until 1882. A railroad had just been pushed through the wilderness of the eastern Upper Peninsula, linking the iron country around Marquette with St. Ignace. That year, two industries sprang up almost overnight along the new line. Robert Dollar built a sawmill just west of town. A group of Detroit businessmen built the Vulcan Furnace Company, which baked the surrounding hardwood forests into charcoal and used it to smelt iron.

The little settlement that grew up around the furnace took its name from one of those Detroit men: John Stoughton Newberry, a railroad investor and congressman. He’s said to have never set foot in the town that carried his name. Early streets were named after his children. The furnace became Newberry’s main employer, burning through more than a thousand acres of hardwood a year. For a time it ranked among the largest makers of charcoal iron in the country. Logging camps spread across the county. From the 1880s into the 1920s, the village was a busy hub of lumberjacks, sawdust, and smoke.

That history is still close to the surface. Just north of town, the Tahquamenon Logging Museum keeps the lumberjack era alive. It has original buildings, old equipment, and lumberjack breakfasts cooked over a wood stove. And right in the village, the Luce County Historical Museum fills the old 1894 sheriff’s house and jail — cells and all — with the story of the county’s early days.