Michigan's Oldest City Is Older Than the United States

Most American cities were founded after the Revolution. A few go back to colonial times. But here’s a fun thing about Michigan’s oldest city: it was founded 108 years before the Declaration of Independence.

Sault Ste. Marie — known affectionately as “the Soo” — sits at the rapids where Lake Superior pours down into Lake Huron via the St. Marys River. Indigenous people had been gathering at this spot for over 2,000 years before any European arrived. The Ojibwe called it Bahweting — “the Gathering Place” — and they returned every summer to fish the rapids, which were so thick with whitefish you could practically scoop them out with a hand net. French fur traders began passing through in the 1620s.

Then, on July 20, 1668, a French Jesuit priest named Father Jacques Marquette established a permanent Catholic mission on the riverbank and named the spot Sault Sainte Marie (“Saint Mary’s Rapids,” after the Virgin Mary). That’s the founding date of the modern city — and the oldest European settlement still in existence in what would become Michigan. It makes Sault Ste. Marie one of the oldest continuously inhabited communities west of the Appalachian Mountains.

The same Marquette later became famous for joining Louis Jolliet on the 1673 expedition that gave Europeans their first map of the Mississippi River. Today the city is best known for the Soo Locks (which we covered in Volume 2) — but it has been a place that mattered for many centuries longer than anyone tends to realize.