ONTONAGON

Region: Porcupine Mountains and Ontonagon

This tucked-away old harbor town at the mouth of the U.P.'s longest river is not a major tourist destination, but it offers more than a quick look would suggest. Just east of town is a wonderful mile-long sandy beach on Lake Superior with a shady park of big trees behind it. The Ontonagon County Historical Society Museum downtown is a visual delight, jammed with interesting and colorful old things. Nearby is what may well be the U.P.'s zaniest bar, Stubb's. One notable shop shop carries locally made candles and a sophisticated collection of local minerals .

Kevin Musser collection

Like today, 1940s Ontonagon depended economically on its big papermill and on logging. Another part of the local economy then were the small farms established largely by Finns who bought cutover land. Between the 1940s and now, the White Pine Mine, a major regional employer, has come and gone.

But the town has had a series of serious blows. Its downtown streetscape has a snaggletooth look, the result of the Great Ontonagon Fire of 1896 from which it still hasn't fully recovered. More modest buildings replaced those constructed during the town's 19th-century prosperity from mining exploration and massive logging. In the 1850s, fortune-hunting prospectors gathered at the five-story Bigelow House hotel plotting ways to strike it rich.

Back then the town prospered to the point where it had attracted a school teacher from the University of Michigan and a teacher of French and drawing for young ladies—in addition to opportunists drawn to this promising locale. Ontonagon had one of the U.P.'s earliest newspapers and a pioneering inter-city phone system. A plank road connected it with Rockland in 1859. The toll house on U.S. 45 going out of town can still be seen, identified by a historical marker.

Native Americans had occupied the area going back at least 5,000 years. European occupation of the region began in the 1790s with English fur traders. They were followed by prospectors and miners, guided by ancient pits dug by a people anthropologists have yet to identify. Member of this still-mysterious society had dug pit mines long before Woodland Indians (who seemed never to have learned how to make things with the metal) moved into the area. At the Minesota Mine outside Rockland, so many ancient stone hammers were found, they filled 10 wagons.

But the profits from Ontonagon County mining were tiny compared to the wealth copper and iron brought cities like Houghton-Hancock and Marquette. The enormous stands of white pine which could be floated down the Ontonagon river created the town's next economic upswing beginning in the 1880s, first with lumber and shingle mills, and then, interestingly enough, by a company that made a product that became familiar all over America—the Diamond match. The Diamond Match Company made lumber out of its best wood, then used its second-rate logs to make so many matches it became one of the U.P.'s biggest companies. Diamond's two sawmills employed 500 people. Its prosperity was reflected in the magnificent-looking brick company store for employees (also destroyed in the fire).

Then more bad luck. Not only did Diamond run out of pine to make its matches, but the Great Ontonagon Fire of 1896 destroyed the entire village and its lumber mills. Having already harvested the area's white pine, Diamond Match decided not to rebuild. The town's 2,300 homeless residents were left to shift for themselves.

But in a heroic example of grit, townspeople rebuilt. Ontonagon eventually grew to a population peak of about 2,400 in the 1970s. Logging the remaining hardwood and hemlock helped keep the town afloat, boosted by the arrival of a big paper mill in 1921 (still running today by Smurfit-Stone Corp). Even farming played a part in the town's revival. Finnish immigrants, eager to get out of the mines, treasured being able to have their own farms. They could survive on forty-acres augmented with income from logging. But farming in this cold climate began to dwindle after the 1920s.

Ontonagon has always been a harbor town, strategically situated on a long stretch of Lake Superior consisting mainly of high bluffs. It's now an official harbor of refuge, the only safe Lake Superior port of any size between far away Eagle Harbor, way up the Keweenaw Peninsula, and Chequamegon Bay in Wisconsin. Furthermore, it's at the mouth of the 157-mile-long Ontonagon River, the U.P.'s longest. The river was the conduit for huge volumes of logs, first made into lumber, then matches, then paper.

Slated for demolition in 2011, this huge Smufit-Stone mill once produced 240 million tons of corrugated paper a year. Its demise echoes the devastating 1896 fire that destroyed the big Diamond Match factory here and most of village with it.

Today the river's use is primarily recreational. A well-equipped city marina across the river from downtown has 7 transient and 29 seasonal slips. It sits half way between the old and new U.S. 64 highways. The new re-routed highway became yet another source of unhappiness for many Ontonagians. It is 1,000 feet upstream from the marina. A quarter-mile-long bridge (the U.P.'s longest) was needed when the existing swing bridge became redundant and was dismantled. The old U.S. 64 went straight down the city's main street before turning 90° west toward the bridge over the river, boosting downtown businesses. The new U.S. 64 by-passes downtown altogether. Adding insult to injury, boaters who used to dock at the marina had only a short walk across the old bridge (now gone) to get downtown. The new bridge means a much longer walk. Downtown business, not surprisingly, has been badly hurt by the re-routing of 64.

Tied up near the mouth of the Ontonagon River, this dredge is essential in keeping the river deep enough for freighters. Such dredging is paid for by specific Congressional appropriations. Future funding is far from certain.

That's not the only problem facing Ontonagon. It has only one major employer, Smurfit-Stone, the town's economic mainstay almost 90 years. The enormous paper mill's 240 employees make 800 tons a day of the corrugated sandwiched layer that gives cardboard boxes their strength. The plant is powered by coal. Freighters arrive 6 times a year, each arrival bringing 16,000 tons. But the freighters need at least water 17-19 feet deep at Smurfit's dock. But the same long river that brought logs to the town's mills also brings lots of sediment which settles near the mouth. Maintaining the needed depth for freighters requires an annual $400,000 dredging that the federal government has long been paying. A budget-cutting law now limits this expensive service only to harbors handling a million tons of cargo a year. Even with the additional 200,000 tons of coal that arrive annually at the dock for the nearby White Pine Electric plant, the Ontonagon harbor falls well short of this minimum tonnage. So far Michigan politicians have gotten special exemptions to continue the dredging at no cost to the city, but no one knows how long this will continue. At stake is the very real possibility that Smurfit-Stone will close if the federal funding is discontinued, yet another economic disaster for Ontonagon.

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