ESCANABA

Region: Escanaba, Menominee & the Green Bay Shore

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One of the glories of Escanaba is its 120-acre Ludington Park, a lumber magnate's gift to the city in 1863. It has 5 miles of paths and a wonderful children's playground.

Citizens also enjoy a homegrown cultural life centered on the Bonifas Arts Center, local galleries, and the 8th Street Coffee House (see Downtown Escanaba along Ludington Street). For the U.P., Escanaba is an urbane place, not the super-folksy kind of small town depicted in movie star Jeff Daniels' comic play and film, Escanaba in da Moonlight. Gladstone Apparently Daniel couldn't resist the rhythmic possibilities of pairing Escanaba's name with the Finnish-American "da," though in truth Swedish, Norwegian, French, and German ancestry is far more common in this area than Finnish.

Sign on an old building in Escanaba.

The place name "Escanaba" is a distortion of the Ojibwa term "land of the red buck." It refers to a famous hunting ground north of Escanaba that was crossed by a heavily traveled deer trail. The region attracted Indians from hundreds of miles away because of its abundance of deer. Many paddled up the Escanaba River to reach it. The area remains a prime place for deer hunting in the Upper Peninsula.

A big Coast Guard cutter in dry dock in Escanaba harbor getting repairs.

A visitor's first impression driving into town is of the unappealing ten miles of commercial sprawl that extends along U.S. 2/U.S. 41 and the Little Bay de Noc between Escanaba and Rapid River. But there is surprisingly varied beauty close at hand. The lakeshore just south of downtown and along the east shore of Little Bay de Noc has pleasant places to stroll. Along the little-developed stretch of M-35 south to Menominee one sees frequent striking glimpses of Green Bay and, in the distance, islands and Wisconsin's Door Peninsula. Over 100 sights of unusual scenic and historic interest between Gladstone and Menominee are marked with special signage as the Hidden Coast Recreational Heritage Trail.

The area also has many rivers and thousands of acres of state and national forest land. For boaters, fishermen, canoeists, hunters, and artists, the Escanaba area is an attractive, low-cost place to live. It shows up on national surveys of most affordable cities.

Escanaba owes its relative prosperity to its climate, atypically mild for the Upper Peninsula, and its excellent shipping location. The city began as an iron and lumber port during the Civil War. Union armsmakers, railroads, and shipbuilders needed speedy delivery of iron from the Marquette Range. In 1864 a railroad was built from Negaunee's iron mines to Escanaba, whose natural deep-water harbor made an excellent port. Most of the Little Bay de Noc is 50 to 70 feet deep. In the 1860s the Nelson Ludington Lumber Company of Marinette, Wisconsin, started to cut timber in the area. It platted the town, providing for its wide streets. In an act of unusual foresight, the company gave a mile of prime lakeshore for the new town's beautiful Ludington Park.

By the 1870s the park and the House of Ludington hotel (see Escanaba Lodgings at right) were destinations for tourists who arrived on steamships. In that decade the port got an extra boost when the Chicago & Northwestern Railroad connected Escanaba to the newly opened iron mines of the Menominee Range in Norway, Iron Mountain, and Iron River.

Dick Lund

The 1000-foot-long Columbia Star loads 64,000 tons of taconite pellets at Escanaba on Oct. 16, 2001.

Being in the U.P.'s "banana belt" helped shipping and farming, too. Shielded from Lake Superior blizzards, the area gets an average annual snowfall of just 50 inches, a fourth of what's usual in many northern Lake Superior locales. In 1910, Clover-Land magazine's enthusiasm for promoting Upper Peninsula agricultural possibilities helped create the county fair that later became the Upper Peninsula State Fair. It attracts over 100,000 visitors a year each August. Michigan's peculiar geography, a result of the Toledo War - see "Distinctively U.P." on the left side of our web site - means it's the only state to have two state fairs.

Enormous quantities of iron ore continues to be shipped from Escanaba's harbor. The mile-long, 300-foot high stockpile of iron taconite pellets is a city landmark on the shoreline. It lies just south of the quarter-mile-long ore docks jutting out into the bay north of downtown. These concentrated iron and clay pellets, created to transport iron ore more efficiently, are round and marble-sized. Not surprisingly, Escanaba's youth, having found them perfect ammunition for their slingshots, make regular trips to the mountainous heap to resupply their arsenals.

At one time most of the world's bird's-eye maple, harvested in forests up to 200 miles away, was shipped from the harbor docks, located just north of downtown. Today iron shipments dominate shipping activity here. Once Escanaba's port was second in importance to Marquette's, but their shipments are now equal, some 6 million tons a year. Iron ore from the Tilden and Empire mines near Ishpeming is moved by rail to Escanaba, bound for northern Indiana steel mills. Escanaba's big ore-shipping facility is more modern than Marquette's. It uses huge 2,200-foot-long, high-speed conveyors to load taconite rather than dropping the pellets noisily into ships' holds from ore dock pockets, as it's done in Marquette.

The huge Mead paper mill just north of Escanaba, purchased in 2005 by newly-formed NewPage paper, makes coated paper for textbooks (60% of its output) and magazines. It draws logging trucks from throughout the Upper Peninsula. With about 1,200 workers, the plant dwarfs all other companies in the region.

Ludington Park offers convenient family fishing right in town.

The area's relatively low wages help several sizable machine shops who do contract work for national firms such as Caterpillar and Cummins. The hottest company in town these days is Engineered Machine Products, west of town on 28th Street. In just a few years it has become the country's top manufacturer of diesel engine cooling pumps, generating over $280 million in annual revenues, a 65% market share. Its impressive R&D site is steadily expanding the range of products EMP makes.

Although its population has been steadily descreasing for decades, Escanaba has managed to escape the boom-and-bust economy of many other Upper Peninsula towns. Unlike most U.P. communities based on timber and mining, it's bigger now than it was in 1900, when it had 9,000 residents.

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