MENOMINEE AND MARINETTE
Region: Escanaba, Menominee & the Green Bay Shore
|
| Click to enlarge |
These classic lumber towns were shaped by their location at the mouth of the Menominee River, one of the largest watersheds in the north woods.
|
| Photography Plus |
| More than most cities in the upper Great Lakes, Marinette, WI (left) and Menominee, MI continue to have economies dependant of the river that separates them. |
The 1860s kicked off the boom times for Menominee, Michigan, on the river's north bank, and Marinette, Wisconsin, on the south bank. Menominee was the U.P.'s biggest lumber port. Large-scale lumbering, financed by investors in Chicago, Milwaukee, and the East, meant that the harbor bustled with shipping activity until 1910, when the timber finally gave out.
Residents of Menominee and Marinette have an unusual amount of public land on the water: the shores of Green Bay, with campgrounds and sand beaches; home sites for miles on the Menominee River shore; many areas of wildlife-rich wetland; and, upstream on Wisconsin's nearby Peshtigo River, some of the Midwest's best whitewater.
Affordable housing, affordable boating, pretty good schools — it seems like an ideal place to raise a family. it's hard to believe that hundreds of skilled manufacturing jobs go unfilled at Marinette Marine, Enstrom Helicopter in Menominee, and some other employers. Maybe motorists on U.S. 41 just aren't aware that Lake Michigan is just a few blocks away? An Economic Development billboard on 41 suggests, "Why not work where you vacation?"
The active harbor at the river mouth is an unusual mix: trawlers of Ruleau Bros. Fish Co., perhaps the largest in the Upper Lakes, "salties" from Finland come around 20 times a year, delivering high-quality pulp. Marinette Marine, begun in 1942 to build Navy barges, has become a major U.S. shipbuilder employing 800. It launches bring celebrities to town. In 2005 Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert came with and his wife, _____, to launch Coast Guard ships like the new Mackinaw, based in Cheboygan, Michigan. Former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani came for the launch of one of the three big double-ended Staten Island ferries built here. See "Menekaunee Harbor" and "Riverview Park" for details.
Local people think of Menominee and its slightly bigger sister city, Marinette, Wisconsin, as the "twin cities." Thirteen institutions use "M&M" in their name, including the YMCA and a shopping mall. The cities now work together as the River Cities Chamber of Commerce, promoting shared tourism and in economic development, even though they are in different states. Michigan's unusual position on two peninsula has contributed to a certain insularity on the part of its politicians and the beleaguered Big Three automakers. As a longtime Menominee resident, the Upper Peninsula's popular congressman, Bart Stupak, has the greater perspective from living on a border.
The Menominee Indians (or "Wild Rice People") fished (largely for sturgeon and for the smaller menominee), hunted, and harvested wild rice near the river mouth. Not so very long ago wild rice grew in what's now the parking lot of the M&M Plaza by the Interstate Bridge. The Menominee and the Ojibwa were original inhabitants of the Upper Peninsula and northern Wisconsin. They go back long before the 1600s, the time when disruptions and conflicts between native peoples occurred because of the fur trade and the French- British struggle to control North America.
French fur traders stopped as early as the mid-1600s to trade at the large Menominee fishing village at the river's mouth. Marinette was named after "Queen" Marinette, the Menominee woman married to two traders in succession. "She was not a queen, and her name is probably a contraction of Marie Antoinette," states the Dictionary of Wisconsin History. She lived here from the 1820s until her death in 1865, and managed her husbands' trading business and the real estate she acquired. Her trading skills and kinship network enabled her post to remain independent from John Jacob Astor's fur trading cartel.
Since their high points in 1900, the cities have shrunk in size and importance. Menominee's population, 10% less than in 1980, continues to decline. Today it has about the same population it had in the 1890s.
|
| Mary Hunt |
| Downtown Menominee’s late Victorian architecture on Tenth Avenue is shown off by a vivid sunset. Thai Cuisine (white sign) serves noteworthy Thai food. First Street, along the waterfront, has intact blocks of historic storefronts and the grand Spies Public Library, well worth a visit. |
The twin cities are unusual in having a dredged ship channel that permits freighters to travel as far as one mile up the Menominee River. Marinette is home to Marinette Marine, located right on the river three long blocks east of downtown. One the few major Great Lakes shipbuilders, it started in 1942 making World War II navy barges. Marinette Marine now builds tugs, minesweepers, and buoy tenders for the Coast Guard and other customers. When ships near completion, they are moored on the river for outfitting. Then they can clearly be seen from Menominee's River Park. It's reached by taking 10th Street south past the M&M Plaza shopping center, then turning right onto Sixth Avenue. It is quite a surprise, upon occasion, to see the bright orange of a new Staten Island Ferry here in the Middle West, completely out of context, in almost a small town setting.
|
| The Staten Island Ferry "Spirit of America" was side-launched into the Menominee River on Dec. 18. This is the third (and last) ferry built by Marinette Marine for the City of New York. Photo by Dick Lund. |
The Menekaunee Bridge leads from downtown Menominee's First Street to the taverns and docks of Marinette's eastside Menekaunee neighborhood. The bridge provides a good vantage point for boat-watching. If you're lucky, you might see a dinky little tug guiding a huge ship through the channel. Old mothballed fishing boats are on the Menominee side. An outmoded Great Lakes freighter has been stripped of its superstructure to provide an unloading platform in Menekaunee. Big vessels move into the harbor to deliver scrap pig iron to foundries and to pick up paper pulp from Menominee's new state-of-the-art pulp factory, Great Lakes Pulp & Fiber at 701 Fourth Avenue. City officials worked hard to induce it to locate here, where old mills once stood. Great Lakes Pulp & Fiber supplies paper plants with recycled office paper, which it has de-inked and bleached, re-pulped and dried. Pulp is sent by rail to NewPage (formerly Mead) in Escanaba and other paper manufacturers in baled form.
|
| Mary Hunt |
| The fall sturgeon run near the Menominee River mouth attracts fishermen, largely Polish and other Eastern Europeans from Chicago. Their culture highly values the ancient fish, now recovering from 19th-century depredation in the Great Lakes. |
A note to visitors: many years ago Menominee's city leaders decided to rename its streets in an ostensibly rational way that can be quite confusing. Just about every street is a number. "Avenues" run east-west, while "streets" are north-south.
The most interesting section of Menominee is downtown facing Lake Michigan - the Harborfront District along First Street. The historic downtown's striking buildings were erected from 1880 to 1910. They extend north and south of the Great Lakes Memorial Marina Park, site of the city's bandshell. The mills and docks that lined the shoreline are long gone, creating civic space for parks and lake views. The district declined as the lucrative lumber market dried up and Marinette's downtown grew. Just a few years ago many of these storefronts were empty. In recent years the district has become over 80% filled with shops. (See "Downtown Menominee" point of interest.)
Downtown Marinette, without lakefront land, has not fared so well. (See "A walking tour of downtown Marinette" as a point of interest.) But Marinette's central area has its share of beautiful old buildings. Current restoration projects may spark further preservation efforts.
The Green Bay shore in Menominee and Marinette has swimming beaches at Henes Park on Menominee's north side, Tourist Park just south of Menominee's historic waterfront district on First Street, and Red Arrow Park on a sandy spit in Marinette. Waterfront benches and a paved path have been installed by Schoegel's Bayview Restaurant on U.S. 41 on Menominee's north side, and the owners hope adjacent businesses will follow suit. The restaurant's big windows are a wonderful place to see birds while sitting in comfort drinking coffee and eating inside. "I had the privilege of having a ringside seat at a rather unusual game preserve this past year. I've seen more neat wildlife while seated at a booth at Schloegel's than I have seen in the wild in a long, long time," wrote local Audubon Society president Mary Moss in a 2002 newsletter. "This last winter I've seen eagles, deer, foxes and coyotes, not to mention an assortment of the usual feathered friends that hit feeders in the winter." Schloegel's now puts bird guides on its tables, and sells them at its gift shop.
Today most of Menominee's biggest employers are related to the paper industry. The various aspects of the forest products industry comprise the Upper Peninsula's leading employment sector. The 300 employees at Menominee Paper make waxed paper, sold under the name Wax-Tex. Lloyd-Flanders Industries, founded in 1906, made woven wicker furniture and won fame for its baby buggies. When employees went on a lengthy strike, founder Marshall Lloyd circumvented the need for reed, and for weavers to hand-weave it, by inventing a loom which machine-wove a very durable wicker made of paper pulp rolled around wires. Today the factory, on U.S. 41/10th Street at 30th Avenue north of downtown, makes to high-end wicker furniture. Its product line, which includes many outdoor pieces, is sold at some 2,000 stores across the country and abroad. The interesting story of Marshall Lloyd and his furniture, now highly collectible, is the subject of a meticulously researched book with color photos, put out by the prestigious art book publisher Rizzoli. Lee J. Curtis's Lloyd Loom: Woven Fiber Furniture is available at Aurora Books in downtown Menominee. Groups can call ahead and possibly schedule a plant tour at (906) 863-4491.
Another unusual Menominee firm is Enstrom Helicopter, started by a U.P. logger and mechanic. Later it was briefly owned by the flamboyant defense attorney F. Lee Bailey, a former helicopter pilot himself. Part of Bailey's motivation in buying Enstrom was to give a job to one of his then most notorious clients, a man involved in the Watergate burglary whom he relocated here. The company, located at 2209 22nd Street by the Menominee airport, is experiencing on a smaller scale the same problems Boeing had awhile ago: losing contracts to foreign competitors.
Until recently Menominee's largest employer had been Emerson Electric, now closed. Its 500 employees had made shop vacs and dehumidifiers sold at Sears Roebuck.
Hunt's Map Guide to the Upper Peninsula
• 13 detailed U.P. maps
• Full color, on sturdy, water-resistant paper
• Folds out to 12”x38”
• Only $6.95
To learn more & buy online, click here
