MORAN

Region: St. Ignace & U.S. 2 to Naubinway

For motorists, Moran passes by in the blink of an eye: a few storefronts and a gas station lined up facing the M-123 and a railroad right-of-way that's now a snowmobile trail. It's flat and plain, with hardly a tree in sight. You'd never suspect that Moran was born from a grand, Detroit-based colonization scheme aimed at Germans. In 1881 the town promoter platted 137 blocks, with 18 lots per block. Such "paper cities" were common in Michigan and other states in the the new west of the 1830s and later.
Bill Leipnitz, Jr. (1873-1957) told the tale of Jacob's City/Moran, leisurely and well. It can be read at www.moranmichigan.org/history. He recalled his family's long-awaited arrival at Jacob City (its original name) after dark, by train. That rail line from the Soo's main line to St. Ignace was the town's reason for being, along with the uncut timber. There was not a light to be seen. he wrote. It was "silent as death." The 80 acres his father had bought turned out to be worthless softwood, not hardwood to sell to St. Ignace's iron smelter. And ithe land was four miles from any road or the tracs.. Most of the German settlers "had never seen a tree except in a park, and couldn't tell poplar from hardwood," Leibnitz wrote.

Conductors announced the stop as "Humbug City." A few settlers succumbed to the winter. Others made the best of it. They formed a "deutsche evangeelische Gesandverein" (German evangelical singing society." A saloon was over the promoter's boarding house. A planned beer garden never got built. Some Poles joined the Germans. Most had to leave their holdings when it became apparent that the area offered no steady income or elmployment. The father's job as a mason in St. Ignace (he came home weekends) enabled the Leipnitzes to stay.

Still, the children, who had lived confined in towns and cities, loved life in Moran. "Here we had the world, so to speak, for a playground."

One imaginative settler, the "outstanding figure of those German dreamers," created a merry-go-round and a fountain, to no particular acclaim, then turned his interests in a more private direction, collecting butterflies and and developing a rare plant garden.

Today the names and dates of many of Moran's German pioneers can be found at the cemetery on the south side of Brevort lake Road, about a mile and a half west of M-123.

Return to St. Ignace & U.S. 2 to Naubinway

PLACES AROUND MORAN TO

Eat Sleep Camp