NAUBINWAY

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

Tucked away from the highway on Arbor Avenue is Frazieer's Fish Shop. They're open when they've caught fish from Lake Michigan to sell.

Another blur for many motorists charging along U.S. 2, Naubinway was once a busy lumbering and fishing village near the mouth of the Millecoquins River. There's more of the actual village than seen from the highway.

One of the crew at King's Fish Market holds a whitefish ready to be processed in the plant across from the company's fishing tug. Each week a refrigerated semi shipps to Brooklyn to make kosher gefilte fish and supply restaurants..

It's south near the lake. In the harbor on the eastern end of town fishing tugs can be seen with their distinctive boxed-in silhouette, protected from the elements. Some commercial fishing still is based in Naubinway.

The view of Naubinway north from the public park next to the harbor.

Settled by French-Canadian fishing families in 1880, Naubinway boomed in that decade. Lumbering and fishing grew together, and 1,500 people lived here. Six hundred men worked at a sawmill; 34 fishing tugs employed many others. By 1898, two years after the mills closed, only six families remained. However, Naubinway stayed focused on fishing, through the devastating 1940s lamprey invasion that decimated the fish population, and into the 1960s. At that time the state decided to favor sport

Fishing tugs leave from a Naubinway tock to net thousands of pounds of whitefish, most of which is shipped to Brooklyn to make gifilte fish popular in the Ashkenazi Jewish community there.

fishing in most Great Lakes waters, thereby put many smaller commercial fishermen out of business. (The state figured that sport fishing would create economic benefits bigger than those of commercial fishing.) Court decisions in the 1980s have enabled Indians to continue fishing, since they never gave up their rights to hunt and gather when they ceded or sold their land to the government.

When a boat comes in, there’s a flurry of activity.

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