Manistique's lumber days, and the bridge that floats

For its first decades, Manistique could only be reached by water. The town grew up where the Manistique River meets Lake Michigan, and the river was its highway: white pine floated down from the forests, sawmills cut it on the banks, and ships carried the lumber away to build cities down the lake. At the height of the boom, around the turn of the century, a single mill employed something like a third of the town, and timber and pig iron steamed out of the harbor daily. The railroad finally arrived in 1888, but the water kept working: in 1916 the harbor got a proper concrete breakwater, and the little red steel lighthouse at its tip — the East Breakwater Light — has guided ships in ever since. Today you can walk right out to it along the town’s lakefront boardwalk.

As the pine ran out, paper took over. A pulp and paper mill went up on the river in the late 1910s, and with it came Manistique’s most famous oddity: the Siphon Bridge, finished in 1919 as part of the mill’s concrete water flume. The water in the flume actually ran higher than the road surface, so the bridge appeared to sit below the river — a “floating bridge” strange enough to land in Ripley’s Believe It or Not. It still carries traffic today.

Right beside it stands the town’s other landmark, the 1922 water tower: a grand octagonal brick tower nearly a hundred and forty feet tall, built in a Roman style and now on the historic registers. The Schoolcraft County Historical Society keeps a museum and park at its feet — a short stroll that takes in a hundred years of Manistique in a single block.