Joel Dinda's photos with the keyword: fayette state park

Fayette State Park, at the north end of Lake Michigan, is a preserved ghost town. It was built by the Jackson Mining Company in the 1870s to run a blast furnace. Those ruins still dominate the view, though they've been improved since I first visited the place around 1980. The townsite's a spectacular setting, and has been a tourist attraction for over a century--far longer than it was a functioning village. Fayette was a company town, with all the structures owned by the mining company. This was the hotel/boarding house. The main reason the blown-out background has no details whatever is that Lake Michigan's close behind the hotel. ===================================== Photo taken in 1998, I think, using a Minolta point-n-shoot. I've heard Tom Friggens of the Michigan Historical Center insist that Fayette's never been a ghost town, as the place has always been occupied by someone. I regard that as a mere technicality.

Fayette's charcoal blast was a long-obsolete technology when it was built in 1877; the British iron industry had largely abandoned it a century before, and the steel industry's Bessemer/Kelly patent dispute had been settled for nearly a decade. I set out to research why Jackson Mining invested in old technology for my senior paper at Macalester, only to discover that Maria Quinlan Leiby, a friend from my bicycling days, had already written that paper. It's a surprisingly small world.

Fayette State Park, at the top of Lake Michigan. July of 1981.

We're back in Fayette. Here (again) are the company store (on the left), the opera house/town hall (on the right)--and the hotel! When Fayette was an active town--mostly in the 1870s and 1880s--these buildings constituted the bulk of the Fayette "business district." The skilled tradesmen lived out on the peninsula (to the right), while general labor lived near the blast furnace (to the left). Everyone shopped at the store, and met for entertainment and governmental functions at town hall. The hotel--called the Shelton House--was both a boarding house and a host for visitors. For over a century, now, Fayette's been a tourist destination--a ghost town--and these buildings have survived largely because of formal and informal preservation efforts. A beautiful and attractive place which happens to be a significant historical artifact. The reason there's no background for this photo is that the buildings are on a relatively skinny spit of land. The photo was shot in June of 1981 from near the superintendent's home.