Region 7:

Escanaba, Menominee & the Green Bay Shore

The flat to rolling land bordering Green Bay's western shore of Green Bay is both fertile and temperate by U.P. standards. Locals call this area the "banana belt." Its mean temperature of 45° F is about the same as Big Rapids or Clare, Michigan cities far to the south.
With many dairy farms and a large acreage of hayfields, Menominee County leads the U.P. in agriculture revenue. Farming took hold early to supply lumber camps. Today Menominee County milk and cream is shipped north to Jilbert's Dairy in Marquette and south to Wisconsin cheese makers.

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.

The region's development has been shaped by the lumber empires that harvested the timber riches along its south-flowing rivers. Escanaba, Menominee, and its Wisconsin twin city of Marinette were destined to grow rich because of their locations at the mouths of the Escanaba and Menominee rivers, the longest good logging river systems that flowed into Lake Michigan. The sawmills at their outlets could easily ship great volumes of lumber to Chicago, an enormous market itself. First the burgeoning city had to be rebuilt after the 1871 fire. Then it developed myriad rail connections to growing towns and cities on the vast and largely treeless prairie to the west.

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.

The ethnic mix here today largely reflects the immigrants in logging camps: Germans, French-Canadians, Norwegians, Swedes, and some Irish and Poles. There are fewer Finns, Italians, Croats, and Slovenes than on the iron ranges. The descendants of these immigrants have long been assimilated. In just 2.5% of Delta County and 3.7% of Menominee County homes is a language other than English spoken, half the percentages in most U.P counties. (Michigan's overall rate is 8.4%.)

Today, a hundred years after lumbering's heyday, you can still see many of the grand results of the riches made by local logging and sawmill tycoons Their mansions and impressive downtown buildings make Escanaba, Menominee, and Marinette interesting places to explore.

The land has finally recovered from the devastation of clearcuts, forest fires, and the resulting erosion. Land not suited to farming reverted to the government for nonpayment of taxes. That land, augmented by land purchases from hunting licenses and natural gas drilling on state land, is the basis of the Hiawatha National Forest and the Escanaba River State Forest. This public land is managed both for recreation and harvesting timber. Many area rivers offer good trout fishing and, when water levels are high enough, scenic canoeing.

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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.

Of all the great logging rivers in Michigan and Wisconsin, only the Saginaw and Muskegon compare with the Menominee River. Wide and long, it forms much of the Michigan-Wisconsin border, along with its tributaries, the Brule and Paint. The combined Menominee River system watershed is the longest of any in the Upper Peninsula. The Brule's headwaters are west of Iron River, over 120 miles from the Menominee's mouth. Lumber barons worked their way up the rivers to Iron Mountain, Iron River and beyond. As the 20th century dawned, logging was waning. The last Menominee River drive was in 1917.

The area has been something of a backwater ever since the timber gave out. Escanaba and surrounding Delta County have grown a little in recent years, thanks to more industry and also to some tourism. Menominee County has finally stabilized at about 25,000 after losing population for years, in part because of competition with adjoining Wisconsin. Until Michigan's property tax reduction in the 1990s, Wisconsin enjoyed a competitive advantage in attracting new businesses.

Fishing is a major draw to this area. Little Bay de Noc has been rated by USA Today as one of the world's ten top fishing spots, especially for walleye. Professional walleye fishermen regularly travel here on their tournament circuit. Deer hunters come here because the region, with its relatively light snowfall, has the U.P.'s greatest concentration of deer.

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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)