Ghost Towns

Fayette State Park, Michigan, 1998. The grey building was the Sheldon House when Fayette was an active town, and the limestone and brick building in the foreground was the machine shop. The Garden Peninsula's residents include a number of commercial fishermen, and Escanaba's Bishop comes by early in the summer to bless the fishing fleet. That's the event we're watching develop in this photograph. This picture works quite well in black and white, by the way; along with the horse-drawn carriages, it has an apparent authenticity which seems quite impressive. Perhaps I'll post that version, too.... Scanned from a negative; taken with my Nikon N90s

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

Another photo from our 1981 visit to Fayette State Park. Fayette's housing, like most places, was segregated by class. The laborers lived on the hill beyond the blast furnace, which can't have been a really desirable location. None of those dwellings seem to have survived. White collar, technical, and supervisory staff lived out on the peninsula across the bay from the blast. Most of those folks lived in houses like these, several of which did survive. Note, though, that the survival involved lots of work; one extensive round of maintenance was, as you can see, occurring during our 1981 visit.

Tom Friggens, long the State of Michigan's chief U.P. historian, likes to point out that Fayette was never fully abandoned and therefore not an actual ghost town. That fact, more than anything else, explains the town's survival. One of the striking things about Fayette is the century-old wooden buildings. That the large stone blast furnace survived isn't really surprising, nor is the persistence of the ruined company store. Those are sturdy structures. But Fayette's surrounded by Lake Michigan, and Lake Michigan's weather is pretty hostile to wooden construction. The hotel really couldn't be more exposed, and the nearby town hall and this office structure are nearly as defenseless. Moreover, several of the wooden houses, which are in the woods and enjoy better protection, have been reduced to their stone foundations. The answer is tourists. Soon after Jackson Iron abandoned the town, entrepreneurs turned the place into a vacation destination. Snail Shell Harbor is simply beautiful , and the not-yet-ruined blast furnace gave the "ghost town" an ambiance unlike anywhere else on Lake Michigan's shore. The salt box houses survived as vacation homes, the hotel as a hotel, this office as an office, and the town hall as an auditorium. Other, less useful, buildings were not maintained and fell to the weather's pounding. This photo also dates from our 1981 visit. At that time the buildings really were around a century old; now they're older.

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 .

One last 1981 photo from Michigan's Fayette State Park.

DH Day's Glen Haven Store, and outbuildings. Now a museum, and one of the offices for the National Park (Lakeshore).

This used to be M-209--"Michigan's shortest state highway". Sleeping Bear Inn on the right, the Day Store on the left, the Blacksmith Shop beyond the store, and a handful of houses. Even in its prime this was a tiny place.

The Inn, with the Day Store in the distance.