Munising: The Lumber Town at the Island
Near Munising, Michigan
The town at your wheel takes its name from the island offshore. Munising comes from the Ojibwe word Minissing, meaning at or near the island, a nod to Grand Island filling the bay just north. This was built as a working town.
When the railroad and the docks arrived, Munising ran on timber and iron. The great hardwood and hemlock forests fed the charcoal furnaces and fed the mills, and along the waterfront rose a leather tannery that boiled hemlock bark to cure hides. Paper and woodenware works turned local timber into finished goods.
Loggers cut the pine and hemlock right down to the lake, and in places along this coast they built long wooden slides to send the logs roaring down the bluffs to waiting boats. Munising became the seat of Alger County and, in nineteen fifteen, an incorporated city. Today the mills are quiet and the visitors have come instead, but the bones of the old lumber town are still here, wrapped around one of the finest harbors on Lake Superior.
