The Pere Marquette name and Father Marquette

Look at a map around Ludington and one name keeps showing up: Pere Marquette. There’s the Pere Marquette River, Pere Marquette Lake that forms the harbor, a Pere Marquette township, even an old railroad by that name. They all point back to one man.

Father Jacques Marquette was a French Jesuit priest and explorer who, with Louis Jolliet, became one of the first Europeans to travel the Mississippi River in the 1670s. On the long journey home he fell ill, and in the spring of 1675 his companions brought him ashore here on the eastern coast of Lake Michigan, where he died. He was not yet forty. Two years later, Native friends carried his remains north to be buried at the mission he had founded at St. Ignace.

By long tradition, that final landing was right here, at the mouth of the river that now carries his name, and a tall white cross on the bluff south of town marks the spot. It glows at night and can be seen far out on the lake. One honest note: the exact place is debated. The town of Frankfort, up the coast, makes the same claim, and years ago the state put up a marker in each town. Wherever his last breath truly came, his name has belonged to this stretch of shore for generations.