Region 7:

Escanaba, Menominee & the Green Bay Shore

Michigan's long scenic Green Bay coast line has much to offer visitors: historic lumber towns with interesting old architecture and good food, famously good fishing, lots of fine beaches, lots of camping sites and canoe trails, iconic lighthouses, and the U.P.'s most impressive casino complex in Harris.
There are outstanding parks with beaches near the harbors of Escanaba, Gladstone, and Menominee; along the Green Bay shore between Escanaba and Menominee; and at the Little Bay de Noc Recreation Area of the Hiawatha National Forest. Many have campgrounds.

The NewPage Escanaba paper mill on the north side of town produces about 770,000 tons a year of paper using 500,000 tons per year of wood. It employs 1,100. The original mill has been around for a century.

Of the area's three lighthouses, two have towers to climb, those in Escanaba's beautiful Ludington Park and at the remote tip of the Stonington Peninsula. Menominee's North Pier Light is by a beach, park, and active harbor, near Menominee's historic harborfront downtown with its specialty shops and some good restaurants. Between Cedar River and Menominee, the unusual West Shore Fishing Museum illuminates the lives and work of commercial fishermen.

Whitewater rafting is a popular activity on the Menominee and Peshtigo rivers along and south of the Michigan-Wisconsin border. Marinette County has developed many attractive rustic parks (some with campgrounds) by the numerous waterfalls in its northern part.

Delta County claims to have more freshwater shoreline than any other county in the nation. It includes the long Stonington Peninsula and much of the Garden Peninsula.

Celebrated for its walleyes, Little Bay de Noc attracts the largest concentration of ice fishing shanties in the U.P. What you see here is just a fraction of the total.

Fishing, especially on the Little and Big Bays de Noc of Lake Michigan, has long been the chief recreation draw to the Bays de Noc. There's good fishing in streams of the national forest and on state land along the Cedar River. USA Today proclaimed Little Bay de Noc one of the world's ten top fishing spots, especially for WALLEYE. The Bays de Noc fishery has declined somewhat since 2004, due in part to the changing ecology of Lake Michigan and the invasion of zebra and then quagga mussels. But vigorous efforts to build back the walleye population are underway.

Huge lumber empires shaped the region. Between 1870 and 1910 they harvested the timber of vast watersheds flowing into Lake Michigan. Menominee, its Wisconsin twin city of Marinette, and Escanaba were destined to grow rich because of their locations at the mouths of the Menominee and Escanaba rivers, Lake Michigan's longest logging river systems. Lumber towns spawned foundries and manufacturing that kept the logging and sawmill operations going

The Menominee is one of Michigan's great logging rivers, creating the U.P.'s biggest watershed. Wide and long, it forms much of the Michigan-Wisconsin border, along with its tributaries, the Brule and the Paint River.

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The Menominee River forms the Michigan-Wisconsin border. Its mouth, legendary for its huge populations of fish, was the location of a Chippewa Indian village. In 1796 a French fur trapper built a post here. Then came a succession of ever larger saw mills, to which millions of logs were floated down the 118-mile-long river. It remains an important harbor, where on the Marinette side over 1,000 vessels have been built, many for the U.S. Navy.

Lumbermen worked their ways up the rivers to Iron Mountain, Iron River, and beyond. Competing lumber companies cooperated as boom companies, creating dams in small streams without enough water to float logs.

Sawmills at the outlets of the Menominee, Escanaba, Cedar, Ford, and Rapid rivers shipped great volumes of lumber to Chicago. That burgeoning Midwestern metropolis had to be rebuilt after the 1871 fire.

Chicago developed myriad rail connections to the growing towns and cities on the vast, largely treeless prairie to the west, creating an immense market for north woods pine from northern Michigan and Wisconsin. Chicago booster and developer William B. Ogden, its first mayor, played a leading role in the development of Menominee/Marinette, Peshtigo, and Escanaba. First he built lines west to Galena, Illinois, and beyond. Later he extended his Chicago and Northwestern railroad to Menominee and Marinette, Escanaba, and Iron Mountain.

At the same time iron mines spread westward across the western U.P., creating a demand for even bigger ports to ship the heavy ore. Escanaba's first ore dock dates from 1865. Even today Escanaba ships huge amounts of iron pellets, about as much as Marquette.

Today near U.S. 2 from Escanaba to the northeast long slow trains haul logs, building materials, coiled steel, and empty boxcars. Sometimes these trains block U.S. 2/U.S. 41 in Gladstone from the golf course and fine homes on the bluffs—surely a lesson in patience. The Canadian National tracks here reach the West, East, and Gulf Coasts.

As the 20th century dawned, logging was already on the wane because the white pine, which could be floated down rivers, was running out. Even as Menominee and Marinette's grand homes and commercial buildings were being built between 1890 and 1900, smaller and smaller logs were floating to sawmills. The last Menominee River logging drive was in 1917. The area has not grown much since.

The forestlands eventually recovered from the devastation of clear-cuts, forest fires, and the resulting erosion. Land not suited to farming often reverted to the government for nonpayment of taxes, especially during the Great Depression of the 1930s. That land created the million-acre HIAWATHA NATIONAL FOREST and plus huge tracks of state forest land. Also, starting 15 miles north of Menominee, many wetlands west of Lake Michigan are owned by the state of Michigan. This public land is managed both for recreation (especially hunting) and for harvesting timber, especially cedar logs. Hiking trails are near Cedar River and north of Rapid River. The Bay de Noc-Grand Island trail, used by native people, is also an equestrian trail. Many area rivers offer good trout fishing and, when water levels are high enough, scenic canoeing.

Today, well over a hundred years after lumbering's heyday, you can see some grand homes and business blocks built by lumber. Menominee's downtown is the most dramatic example how the lumber boom nourished a great many striking commercial buildings.

The ethnic mix of residents in and around Escanaba, Menominee, and Marinette today largely reflects the immigrants who came for logging jobs: Germans (especially in Menominee/Marinette), French-Canadians, Norwegians, Poles, some Irish, and many Finn-Swedes living in Escanaba on up to Rapid River. They were Swedish speakers from the then-overpopulated Finnish islands and mainland nearest Sweden. (Finnish and Swedish are both official languages in Finland.)

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For everything from finding Escanaba, Menominee & the Green Bay Shore picnic spots & fishing guides to renting kayaks click here.

ESCANABA, MENOMINEE & THE GREEN BAY SHORE: THE TOP ATTRACTIONS (to locate, see MAP)