Escanaba: The Upper Peninsula's Iron Port

Escanaba exists because of iron ore and the lake that could move it cheaply. When railroad lines reached down from the Marquette iron range in the eighteen sixties, Escanaba was at the other end of the line, on the shore of Little Bay de Noc, with ore docks extending into the water. Ships took the ore south to the steel mills of Chicago and Cleveland.

Escanaba became an important iron ore shipping point on the Lake Michigan shore of the Upper Peninsula, a role it kept for over a century. Ore shipping from the port ended in twenty seventeen, more than a hundred and fifty years after the first ore left it.