Port Huron: Where the Lakes Narrow and Edison Grew Up

You are at the pinch point where Lake Huron empties into the St. Clair River, one of the most strategically watched passages in North America for nearly four centuries.

The French explorer Daniel Greysolon Duluth planted a fort here in sixteen eighty-six, recognizing that whoever controlled this narrow strait controlled the fur trade corridor from the Upper Great Lakes to the Atlantic. The British took it, the Americans took it from them, and in eighteen fourteen the U.S. Army built Fort Gratiot just south of the lakeshore. Eleven years later, in eighteen twenty-five, Congress funded the first lighthouse in Michigan at the mouth of the river. That original tower was so poorly built it collapsed into the current. A sturdier replacement went up in eighteen twenty-nine and stands today as the oldest surviving lighthouse in the state, its light still active.

Port Huron incorporated as a city in eighteen fifty-seven, threading together the old military settlement, the village of Peru, and a handful of others. But the name most visitors associate with this city arrived even earlier. In eighteen fifty-four, seven-year-old Thomas Alva Edison moved here with his family and stayed for a decade. He set up a chemistry laboratory in the basement of the family home and, as a teenager, sold newspapers and candy on the Grand Trunk Railway while running homemade experiments in the baggage car. The Thomas Edison Depot Museum now occupies the very station where young Al worked as a news agent from eighteen fifty-nine to eighteen sixty-three, the same years he lost most of his hearing and began compensating with the intense concentration that would define his career.

The Blue Water Bridge spanning the St. Clair River opened in nineteen thirty-eight, connecting Interstate Ninety-Four to Canada's Highway Four Hundred Two. A second span was added in nineteen ninety-seven. On a clear day you can watch thousand-foot lake freighters pass beneath them, heading from Superior and Michigan toward Lake Erie and the sea, the same route the voyageurs paddled three hundred years ago.