L'ANSE

Region: Keweenaw Peninsula

It's amazing how many visitors to the U.P. fondly remember the big cinnamon rolls at the Hilltop Restaurant as a highlight.

This town of 2,000 deserves more than the drive-through many travelers going to the Keweenaw give it. L'Anse's waterfront at the head of Keweenaw Bay makes a fine rest stop, thanks to continual improvements on and around Front Street Park: a marina, lighted harborfront walkway, picnic and play facilities, a path to the Falls River waterfalls, and now more paths to connect town and school. The park and especially the marina pier are uncommonly pleasant places to look out and enjoy the water.

Tip of Abbaye Peninsula

At the head of 30-mile-long Keweenaw Bay, this unassuming village and county seat is one of Michigan's settlements with very old European roots. By 1660 a branch of the Sugar Island Band of Ojibwa had come here to fish. In that year they were joined by a French Jesuit priest hoping to save their souls. He built the first mission here. L'Anse, pronounced "LAHNce," is French for "the bay." The settlement later became a trading post and, in 1871, a station on the railroad line between Houghton and Marquette. With the railroad, the port, and trees to be logged in most directions, L'Anse boomed briefly in the 1870s before the national economy went into a tailspin. A good, short county history is online at www.baragacountyhistoricalmuseum.com . Lots of Baraga County historical photos are in one section of Clyde Elmblad's interesting site, highway41north.com .

The social history of a community can be read in part through its churches. In L'Anse, the really large church building, from around 1900, is the impressive stone Sacred Heart Catholic Church, halfway up the Broad Street hill as you enter town. A cluster of interesting Protestant church buildings is up the Main Street hill. To get there, go downtown, then turn right onto Main Street.

A sawmill capitalized on the waterpower of the Falls River making a steep descent into Keweenaw Bay at L'Anse. The mill was already large when Henry Ford bought it in 1922, a time when automobile bodies were largely made of wood. The mill and Ford forests employed a thousand, according to Ford Bryan in Beyond the Model T: The Other Ventures of Henry Ford. The mill shipped as much as 180,000 board feet of lumber a day to its Iron Mountain parts plant. Bryan details a busy, crowded area by the mill and waterfront, with lumber yards "as large as any known," decked logs by today's Front Street Park, a railroad yard, derricks for loading the freighters that docked here, aided by steam tugs. Ford financed L'Anse's unusually impressive high school building up the hill off Fourth Street, now enlarged for grades K-12.

After Ford sold off its Upper Peninsula property, the mill was bought by Celotex to make ceiling tiles. The plant is now part of BPB, a large British-owned conglomerate. It still makes ceiling tiles, using mineral wool instead of wood pulp, and its stack is still a landmark visible most of the way up the Keweenaw Peninsula. Today the ceiling tile plant, the prison outside Baraga, and the Baraga casino are the area's largest employers. Some people commute to the Tilden and Empire iron mines outside Ishpeming, 60 miles away. In 2005 a good deal of the Baraga County timberland once owned by Ford has been purchased for further exploration by Kennecott Minerals, the firm that wants a controversial nickel sulfide mine near the Yellow Dog River blue ribbon trout stream.

Today the L'Anse harbor is again active, dredged for the recent municipal marina. It can handle the biggest Lake Superior pleasure boats, up to 40'. Keweenaw Bay is "the lake trout capital of the Great Lakes," said to have twice the lake trout population as anywhere else. Now sport fishing has replaced commercial fishing in the local economy, partly from visitors, partly in the form of second homes. Indian Country Sports, a good source of information about outdoor recreation in the area, has built a functioning lighthouse to publicize its business and the waterfront.

East of L'Anse Bay the topography quickly climbs to Michigan's highest elevations in the Huron Mountains, creating a number of scenic waterfalls in the process. Mount Arvon, 1,979 feet, is Michigan's high point. The Huron Mountains are eroded stumps of ancient mountains once higher than the Rockies. Today they seem more like hills. Mount Arvon offers no view; it's a tourist destination just so people can say they have visited Michigan's highest point. Members of the Highpointers Club ( www.highpointers.org ) come from afar in their quests to visit high points of every state. The Baraga County Tourist office is the best source of up-to-date information on getting to Mount Arvon (logging rods change) and to all the waterfalls open to the public. Just west of town are the red rock bluffs of Jacobsville sandstone, also known as brownstone, a favorite late 19th-century building material quarried here as well as the better-known quarries at Jacobsville on the Keweenaw Peninsula and near Marquette.

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