KINGSFORD

Region: Iron River, Iron Mountain & the Menominee Range

The wide Menominee River, separting Michigan from Wisconsin, curves around the west sides of Iron Mountain and Kingsford.

Today Iron Mountain mainly sprawls along its busy highways and around its old mine pits. Adjoining Kingsford bears the stamp of 1920s subdivisions familiar to anyone who grew up around Detroit. That's because the town developed around a complex of Ford plants from the early 1920s. Henry Ford, in his quest for industrial independence and self-sufficiency, wanted to own the source of his raw materials. The U.P. had both the iron used in steelmaking and the wood then used for auto bodies.

Ford's energetic scouts bought up vast amounts of timberland and created the first Ford sawmill, one of the world's most modern, on a farm Ford bought outside Iron Mountain. By 1923 the area was incorporated as the village of Kingsford, named after Edward Kingsford, the Iron Mountain Ford dealer and timber cruiser who married Henry Ford's cousin and became a key figure in Ford's Upper Peninsula operations.

Just as in Detroit, Kingsford's main street was Woodward, leading from Carpenter Ave./M-95 to the Ford Airport at Cowboy Lake. It's an attractive little airport, with regular Midwest Airlines flights to Midwest's Milwaukee hub and beyond. Kingsford High teams are known as the Flivvers, a term for a cheap vehicle, often applied to the Ford Model T.

Ford dammed the Menominee River just south of Kingsford and built a hydroelectric plant. Soon after incorporation, Ford's Kingsford complex included lumber kilns; plants to manufacture finished wood parts shipped to body builders; a refinery; and a chemical plant that produced antifreeze, paint solvents, and Kingsford charcoal briquettes, the world's first, developed in 1921 to make use of waste wood. Hardwood chips were charred, ground, mixed with starch, and compressed to form nearly a hundred tons per day, according to Ford R. Bryan in Beyond the Model T: The Other Ventures of Henry Ford. Chapters on Waterpower, 'Northern Michigan Lumber, Mines, and Aircraft touch on Ford's Upper Peninsula projects.

Ford's Iron Mountain operations were the largest industrial complex in the Upper Peninsula. In 1937, "when all-steel bodies prevailed, Iron Mountain then produced Ford station wagon bodies [the much-loved woodies] complete and ready for the final drop on the assembly line," Bryan writes. The woodworking plant closed after Pearl Harbor. Its skilled woodworkers went back to work when the plant reopened in 1942 to produce large gliders, designed to silently carry 40 troops or two helicopters behind enemy lines. The gliders were an especially proud phase of Iron Mountain history.

Today the Ford plants' site, at Breitung and Balsam, is mostly vacant. City officials voted to demolish the landmark stacks a few years ago. As in Dearborn, the residential areas planned for management and workers were separated. Workers' housing was south of Breitung Avenue and the plants, while managers lived in Kingsford Heights, north of Woodward near the airport and golf course. Another older, relatively elite neighborhood is just to the east in the city of Iron Mountain, around Crystal Lake at the west end of H Street.

After Henry Ford died, his far-flung Upper Peninsula empire was critically scrutinized by Ford management for cost-effectiveness and gradually sold off. The briquette company eventually moved south but still bears the Kingsford name. See Iron Mountain.

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PLACES AROUND KINGSFORD TO

Eat Sleep Camp