Lake Michigan

We could see two retired fish tugs from our room in South Haven: Evelyn S, which has been restored on the grounds of the Michigan Maritime Museum, and Elsie J, which was moored by the museum's dock. Elsie J's now doing tourist work --she hosts sunset cruises, ferries divers out to wrecks, and is available for charters. South Haven had a commercial fishing community into the 1970s, but there seems to be no website which explicitly discusses that; instead, many websites mention specific boats or incidents. I'll not try to fill that gap, here, but it would be a fine project for someone. These days the only commercial fishing out of the port seems to be fishing charters, which is a very different business.

I told you we had bad weather in South Haven, then posted a bunch of photos from our one fairweather day. Most of the time Lake Michigan looked like this.... I'm not real happy with this shot, which was the second in the sequence just as I stepped on the walkway. By the time I got a better angle, the waves had diminished and those pix are pretty boring. This one at least shows the waves pounding against the north pier.

A recrop of the photo I posted earlier today....

From Jolli-Lodge, which has a Lake Leelanau address--but I think of it as Leland (as does Yahoo maps, I see). This resort was Mom's favorite vacation place; we'd join her there for Labor Day weekend to end every summer. Taken with my Nikon N90s in early September, 1999.

Good Harbor Bay, on Lake Michigan, looking toward Pyramid Point. A different sunset from yesterday's photo , but another photo from Jolli-Lodge on the same 1999 weekend.

The prettiest place I know: Sleeping Bear Bay on Lake Michigan, on a cold February day. Glen Haven, now a cute little near-ghost town, was once a Great Lakes port, originally shipping lumber then later shipping fruit products. The pilings in this photo are a remnant of that past . That acknowledged, I find it really quite difficult to imagine this place as an active harbor .

Fayette State Park's most important artifact, in 1981. Lake Michigan in the background.

A charcoal iron furnace consumes three main ingredients: Iron ore (of course), limestone, and a forest (to be reduced to charcoal). For Jackson Iron's purposes, Snail Shell Harbor was nearly perfect. There's a limestone cliff within sight of the furnace, forests surrounded the townsite, and Samuel Tilden's new-built Peninsula Railroad was delighted to connect the furnace with the company's mine. And the waterfront, as you see, was mere feet from the furnace. That, too, was a consideration. =============== Fayette State Park in 1981.

Around the time Jackson Iron built Fayette's charcoal iron village, the British iron industry closed down its last charcoal furnace. According to the British iron masters, charcoal iron was expensive and technologically obsolete; moreover the devastation caused by the method was considered unacceptable. What was different in Michigan? In June of 1981 I was halfway through my long-delayed senior year of college, and had just turned in a senior paper which I'd originally expected to address that question. But I soon discovered: * the answer was relatively obvious, * someone had already written that paper, and * I knew that paper's author. So I'd adjusted my focus, and spent spring term examining the business infrastructure supporting mining on the Marquette Range. That, too, was inspired by Fayette. Maria Quinlan Leiby's SUNY Oneonta MA thesis " Charcoal Iron-Making at Fayette, Michigan, 1867-1890 " asked my question, and concluded that America really was different. Forests were abundant, the patent-impaired American steel industry hadn't fully taken root, environmental concerns weren't nearly so prevalent, and (most important) the engineers running America's railroads preferred charcoal iron for making rail car wheels. (Evidently coke-fired iron wheels were more prone to fracture.) Others have since argued that Fayette and its Pennsylvania competitors were advancing the technology and had grown more efficient than the abandoned British operations. Maria was (is) a bicyclist, and we'd first met at a conference some years before. We'd occasionally ridden together, and I'd worked with her husband, another bike club president, on bicycling causes. I'd known she was a state-employed historian, but hadn't known she'd studied Fayette. It was a bit of a shock, but a pleasant one. Small world. ================ A slightly-related story, posted today on a dabbler's journal .

The view from our room at Pointes North Resort . I've probably taken this picture a couple hundred times .

Pointes North has converted part of its beach into a small nature preserve. Traverse City, Michigan.

Nice in Flickr's lightbox .

Last time we were in Petoskey this light was buried in ice (linked photo is not my picture). Far less dramatic this time. But Petoskey is always pretty. That's Harbor Springs across Little Traverse Bay.

The light guarding the channel at Charlevoix, Michigan. Formerly white , but originally and currently red.

Old light--the building--on the left; new light--the steel tower--on the right. In Leelanau State Park at the tip of Michigan's little finger. There was a fox on the beach when we were there the other day. Even though I was several hundred feet away, it abandoned the gull it was carrying and fled. To me I don't seem so scary.

Muskegon's harbor entrance is protected by two breakwaters and two piers. This is the South Pierhead light. There's a square tower at the end of the south breakwater and a smaller navigational aid at the end of the north breakwater.

Traverse City.