Northern Michigan University started with 32 students and six teachers

On September 19, 1899, thirty-two students showed up for the first day of class in Marquette, met by a faculty of six on a 22-acre lot. That was the entire institution — what would eventually become Northern Michigan University, the biggest college in the Upper Peninsula, with thousands of students and a campus you can’t cross in an afternoon.

It opened with one job: making teachers. The Michigan Legislature created it in 1899 as Northern State Normal School, a “normal school” being the old name for a teacher-training college. For its first decades that was the whole mission — turn out schoolteachers for the mining towns and farm towns of the north. You can read the slow widening of its ambitions in its name changes alone. It became Northern State Teachers College in 1927, then Northern Michigan College of Education in 1942, and finally, in 1963, the state made it a full university and gave it the name it carries now.

The teams are the Wildcats, and the school long ago outgrew its single original building. It now runs around 180 degree programs and draws students from across the state and beyond to a city of barely 20,000 people — a real university dropped onto the south shore of Lake Superior.

There’s something fitting about a teacher’s college being the institution that stuck here. The mines that built Marquette County have mostly gone quiet, the ore docks run on a skeleton schedule, but the school that started with three dozen students and a borrowed mission is still here, still the largest thing of its kind for hundreds of miles in any direction.