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History & Culture, page 16
Michigan has stories you won't find anywhere else — shipwrecks that became songs, a sound that started in Detroit, a war fought over Toledo. Pull up a chair for the history and culture of the Great Lakes State.
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The Mastodon
Before robins or white pines, Michigan belonged to the giants — and the mastodon, the state fossil, still turns up in farm fields where it browsed 10,000 years ago.
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The Melon Heads of Saugatuck
The Melon Heads legend warns of deformed children loose in the woods near Saugatuck's Felt Mansion — but the asylum at its center never existed.
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The Michigan Island That Banned Cars in 1898 — and Never Took It Back
Mackinac Island banned automobiles in 1898 and never looked back. More than 125 years later you still get around by foot, bike, or horse — on the only car-free state highway in the country.
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The Most Degreed Person in Modern History Is a Kalamazoo Man Who Just Kept Going to School
Michael Nicholson of Kalamazoo holds the unofficial record for the most earned college degrees — about thirty — and did it for the love of learning.
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The Most Famous Disappearance in Michigan History
Jimmy Hoffa walked out of a Bloomfield Township restaurant parking lot on July 30, 1975, and was never seen again — Michigan's most famous unsolved disappearance.
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The Motor City Also Kept Your Food Cold: The Kelvinator Story
Kelvinator, founded in Detroit in 1914, didn't invent the refrigerator — but it made it practical, controlling 80% of the U.S. market by 1923.
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The Olive Burger: Michigan's Love-It-or-Hate-It Sandwich
Chopped green olives and a tangy mayo sauce on a burger — mid-Michigan's love-it-or-hate-it specialty, born in the old Kewpee chain.
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The Pill That Actually Dissolves Was Perfected in Kalamazoo
Kalamazoo's Dr. William Upjohn cracked the pill that reliably dissolves, patenting his 'friable' pill in 1885 and founding the Upjohn Company in 1886.
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The Pizza Empire That Started With a Borrowed $500 — and a Volkswagen
Domino's Pizza grew from a tiny Ypsilanti shop the Monaghan brothers bought for $500 down — one of whom traded his half for a used Volkswagen Beetle.
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The Queen of Soul Learned to Sing in a Detroit Church
Aretha Franklin, the Queen of Soul, was born in Memphis but raised in Detroit, where she learned to sing gospel in her father's New Bethel Baptist Church.
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The Shipwreck That Became a Song — and a Bell That Still Rings
The SS Edmund Fitzgerald sank in a Lake Superior storm in 1975, just 17 miles from safety. All 29 men aboard were lost — and the ship's recovered bell still rings for them every November.
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The Spot Where Your Eyes Lie to You
St. Ignace's Mystery Spot is a beloved 'gravity hill' roadside illusion — your eyes lie, gravity doesn't break.
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The Square Pizza Born in Auto-Parts Pans
Detroit's square pizza got its crispy, cheesy edges from blue-steel pans first made to hold parts in the auto plants.
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The Strange, True Story of How Michigan Accidentally Gave Wisconsin a Chunk of the U.P.
After Michigan won the U.P., surveyors followed the wrong fork of the Montreal River and handed a chunk back to Wisconsin — and in 1926 the Supreme Court let the mistake stand.
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The Tiny Michigan Town That's the 'Magic Capital of the World'
Tiny Colon, Michigan is the self-proclaimed 'Magic Capital of the World,' home to the planet's largest magic-supply maker and more buried magicians than any cemetery on earth.
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The Wet Burrito: A Michigan Original
The smothered, fork-and-knife burrito that West Michigan calls its own — almost certainly born at Grand Rapids' Beltline Bar in 1966.
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The World's First "Stoplight" Was Born in Detroit — Invented by a Cop From the Thumb
The world's first tri-color, four-way traffic signal was built in 1920 by Detroit police officer William Potts, who was born in Bad Axe and never patented it.
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The World's First Airport Hotel Was Henry Ford's Idea
The Dearborn Inn, conceived by Henry Ford and designed by Albert Kahn, opened in 1931 as the world's first airport hotel — and reopened, restored, in 2025.
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The World's Largest Working Chainsaw Guards a U.P. Gift Shop
Big Gus, the world's largest working chainsaw — 22 feet of V-8-powered steel — guards Da Yoopers Tourist Trap on US-41 near Ishpeming.
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There's a Building in Michigan Whose Whole Job Is to Be Wonderfully Weird
Marvin's Marvelous Mechanical Museum is a free, wall-to-wall collection of working coin-op machines and antique automatons in the Detroit suburbs — currently mid-move, so check before you drive.
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There's a Mountain of Pure Copper Under the U.P. — and America's First Mining Rush Happened There
The Keweenaw Peninsula's pure native copper fueled America's first mining rush in the 1840s — and was mined by Indigenous peoples for thousands of years before that.
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There's a Whole Michigan Town Buried Under the Sand
Singapore was a Lake Michigan lumber boomtown near Saugatuck that the dunes swallowed whole after the surrounding forests were cut down.
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Those Glowing Detroit Tiles All Come From One Little 1903 Pottery
Pewabic Pottery, founded in Detroit in 1903, still makes the iridescent tiles found in landmarks from the People Mover to Chicago's Shedd Aquarium.
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What Does "Up North" Actually Mean in Michigan?
'Up North' isn't a direction in Michigan — it's a place and a feeling: cabins, lakes, and pine forests somewhere past the middle of the mitten, with a border no one can quite agree on.
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What Exactly Is a "Coney Dog" — and Why Do Flint and Detroit Argue About It?
A coney is a hot dog under a meaty, beanless sauce — and Detroit (wet and smooth) and Flint (dry and crumbly) have argued about how to make that sauce for a century.
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What Is "Superman" Ice Cream, and What Flavor Is It Supposed to Be?
Superman ice cream is a red-blue-yellow swirl of lemon, Red Pop, and the famously undefinable Blue Moon — invented, the story goes, by Detroit's Stroh's brewery during Prohibition.
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What's a "Yooper"? What's a "Troll"? And Why Do People Point at Their Hand?
A Yooper is from the Upper Peninsula, a Troll lives 'under the bridge' in the Lower, a Fudgie is a tourist — and yes, Michiganders really do use their hand as a map.
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What's the Deal With the 10-Cent Bottle Deposit?
Michigan's dime-a-can bottle deposit, passed by voters in 1976, is tied for the highest in the country — and it once drove return rates near 97%, the best in the nation.
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Why Detroit Hockey Fans Throw a Dead Octopus Onto the Ice
Detroit Red Wings fans throw octopuses onto the ice — a tradition born in 1952 when two fish-market brothers tossed one for the eight playoff wins it then took to win the Stanley Cup.
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Why Do Some Parts of the U.P. Have a Different Time Than the Rest of Michigan?
Most of Michigan runs on Eastern Time, but four counties in the western U.P. that border Wisconsin — Gogebic, Iron, Dickinson, and Menominee — sit on Central Time.
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Why Does Michigan Have So Many Places Named After Foreign Places?
Michigan's map is full of foreign and classical town names — Paris, Moscow, Athens, Rome — left over from an 1800s naming boom, and locals pronounce most of them their own way.
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Why Does the Upper Peninsula Belong to Michigan and Not Wisconsin?
The Upper Peninsula is attached to Wisconsin, not the rest of Michigan — Michigan got it as a consolation prize for losing the Toledo War to Ohio, and the copper and iron beneath it made the deal a steal.
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Why Doesn't Michigan Have the Death Penalty?
Michigan was the first English-speaking government in the world to abolish the death penalty for ordinary crimes, back in 1846 — and it's the only U.S. state with a constitutional ban.
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Why Is Detroit Called the "Motor City" and "Motown"? (And What's a "Big Three"?)
Detroit is the 'Motor City' for building America's cars — and 'Motown' is both that nickname (Motor Town) and the record label Berry Gordy named in its honor.
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Why Is the Lower Peninsula Shaped Like a Mitten — and Is the Whole State Really Two Pieces?
Michigan really is two separate landmasses, joined since 1957 by the five-mile Mackinac Bridge — and the Lower Peninsula's famous mitten shape is pure luck of the glaciers.
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Why Is Vernors Ginger Ale Such a Big Deal in Michigan?
Vernors is Detroit's own golden ginger ale, one of America's oldest soft drinks — beloved enough that Michiganders drink it flat and warm as cold medicine, or float it into a Boston Cooler.
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Wine on the 45th Parallel: Michigan's Cool-Climate Boom
On the 45th parallel near Traverse City, two slender peninsulas have grown into Michigan's serious, Riesling-loving wine country.
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Yes, There's a Town in Michigan Actually Named Hell
Yes, there's a real town in Michigan named Hell — settled in 1838, officially named in 1841, and happy to let you get 'married in Hell' or crowned mayor for a day.
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Your Backyard Grill Was Invented by Henry Ford (Out of Sawdust)
The charcoal briquette became a household product thanks to Henry Ford, who turned U.P. sawmill scrap into Kingsford Charcoal.
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