Nahma: the whole town that went up for sale

In 1951, you could have bought a whole town in Delta County. Nahma — houses, store, church, hotel, streets and all — went on the market when the Bay de Noquet Lumber Company finally ran out of trees to cut, and Life magazine ran the story under the headline “Sold — One Town.” An Indiana playground manufacturer snapped it up, planning to turn the place into a resort, then never found the money to do it. So Nahma simply stayed Nahma.

The town had been a company’s creation from the start. George Farnsworth and his Wisconsin partners founded the Bay de Noquet (later shortened to Bay de Noc) Lumber Company in 1881 and threw up a sawmill on the Lake Michigan shore the next year. At its peak Nahma held more than 800 people, and the company employed over 1,500 men in the mill and the camps strung out behind it. To haul the timber, it ran its own railroad, the Nahma and Northern — seven locomotives and seventy-five miles of track reaching into the woods. Over seventy years the mill chewed through more than two and a half billion board feet of white pine and hardwood before it cut its last log on July 26, 1951.

What’s left is unusually intact for a U.P. lumber town. The Nahma Inn, built in 1909 to house mill men, still takes guests, and locals will tell you a former kitchen worker never quite checked out. Down by the water you can still trace where the docks and mill stood. It’s the rare ghost-town story where the ghost town is still inhabited — a couple hundred people, retirees and commuters now, living inside a company town the company let go.