Michigan: The Thumb, the West, and Everything Else

Introduction

The three volumes before this one cover the clusters worth building a trip around. This one clears the rest of the Michigan list — the places that were named but never checked, and a few found while checking them. Some turn out to be first-rank destinations. Several turn out to be nothing at all, and saying so plainly is the point: a gazetteer that only lists the good ones sends you driving three hours to a cornfield.

⭐ THE FINDING THAT ORGANISES THIS VOLUME: “ghost town” covers four completely different outcomes, and the word tells you nothing about what you will find. A town can be preserved (Glen Haven), depopulated but still inhabited (Nahma, Seney, Alberta), reduced to fragments (Aral, Port Crescent), or physically gone (Singapore). Only the third and fourth are what most people mean, and only the first two have anything standing.

5.1 The rest of the Copper Country

Cliff Mine and Clifton — Keweenaw County. Walk in. Just south of Phoenix, off US-41 on Cliff Drive. The most productive copper mine in the United States from 1845 to 1854, and the first profitable one in Michigan — this is where the Copper Country actually starts. The land is open for exploration.

🔴 The published warning is not boilerplate: streams, ponds, and hazards across the site, and — the real danger everywhere in this cluster — open mine shafts and wells hidden by overgrowth, with drops of 25 feet and more that you cannot climb out of. Stay on obvious ground, and treat waist-high vegetation as opaque rather than empty.

Phoenix — Keweenaw County. Roadside, one building open. At the junction of US-41 and M-26. The Phoenix General Store is the landmark; the Carpenter-Gothic Phoenix Church stands beside Evergreen Cemetery, established 1843. A ten-minute stop on the way to Cliff or Central, not a destination in itself.

Mandan — Keweenaw County. Look, don’t enter. Right off US-41 about 7.4 miles south of Copper Harbor. Park and walk back into the trees and there are a few abandoned houses still standing, plus foundations and ruins in the weeds. The Mandan and Medora mines were organised in 1864 and worked on and off until they were abandoned in 1909; population peaked around 300, with a post office.

⭐ Mandan is the closest thing on the whole Michigan list to the thing I originally went looking for — actual abandoned houses, standing, in the woods, that you can walk up to. Walk up to them and photograph them; do not go inside.

Gay — Keweenaw County. Roadside. Not a ghost town — fewer than 100 people still live there — but it holds one of the great objects in the state. The stamp mill built in 1921 by the Mohawk and Wolverine mining companies has left its stack: 265 feet tall, 13 feet 4 inches across at the base, tapering to 9 feet at the top. In 1922 Gay had 1,500 residents.

Winona — Houghton County. Walk in. Halfway between Houghton and Ontonagon in Elm River Township. A small parking lot beside the blacksmith workshop, the shop itself, and several outdoor exhibits. Well maintained, easy, and a good leg-stretch on the drive between the Keweenaw and the Porkies.

Copper Falls — Keweenaw County. 🔴 Access uncertain — do not plan around it. Near Eagle Harbor, on the high ground the company called Petherick Hill. The Copper Falls Mine opened in 1846; the Copper Falls Company held about 4,000 acres, and by 1853 the settlement had two boarding houses, twenty-five homes, an office, a sawmill and a stamp mill. A post office opened 10 September 1860 — registered in Houghton County, transferred to Keweenaw on 16 September 1861 — and closed 15 February 1916. A cave-in in 1874 killed seven men, fire took the stamp mill in 1878, and the copper price closed the mine for good in 1901.

⚠ The dates are not clean. Mineral-site records describe a comparatively small operation running 1862–1877, against the 1846–1901 span in the local histories. The difference is most likely between the company and one shaft. It is not resolved here.

🔴 What keeps it off the route is access, not interest. The townsite and the falls above it are reported to be private property, with the Copper Falls loop road signed PRIVATE at both ends. The landowner has said publicly that polite walkers are welcome and that wheeled vehicles are not — the two-tracks rut as soon as there is enough water in the creek to make the falls worth seeing. ⚠ That is a courtesy from an owner, not a right of way, it was offered in a comment thread rather than on a land record, and it can be withdrawn.

⚠ No coordinates are given here, on this dive’s usual rule: better unpinned than wrong. ⭐ Copper Falls is not one of the 23 Keweenaw Heritage Sites — Central Mine is, and Central is public, interpreted, welcoming and close. Take Central. Treat Copper Falls as something to ask about in Eagle Harbor.

5.2 The Ford towns of Baraga County

🔴 Two towns, both bought by Henry Ford, and only one of them is a ghost town. They get listed together constantly, which is how people end up driving to a working village expecting ruins.

Pequaming — Baraga County. Look, don’t enter. Settled 1878 by Charles and Edward Hebard with H. C. Thurber, whose mill was the first and biggest lumber operation on Lake Superior. At its height the town had a band and orchestra, bath houses, boarding houses, churches, a general store, a hotel, 100-plus houses, an ice rink, a livery stable, parks, a post office, a saloon and schools. Between 1880 and 1900 the company all but exhausted the white pine, and in 1923 the Hebard sons sold 40,000 acres including the whole town to Henry Ford, who ran the mills to supply wooden car parts and crating.

The mill closed for good on October 9, 1942 — killed by shipping costs and wartime truck-tyre shortages. The powerhouse and the Ford water tank remain.

Alberta — Baraga County. Open, with rules. NOT a ghost town. 🔴 Every list puts Alberta beside Pequaming and it does not belong there. About 40 miles south of Houghton, it is owned by Michigan Technological University — the Ford Center, 5,500 acres of research forest with a conference centre and a sawmill museum. All the original structures are intact and people still live there. It is a living museum, and worth the stop precisely because it shows you what Pequaming looked like before it emptied.

5.3 The rest of the eastern and central UP

Shelldrake — Chippewa County. Look, don’t enter — PRIVATE. At the mouth of the Shelldrake River on Whitefish Point. Bay City’s Penoyer Brothers began logging here in 1895; fires and the exhaustion of timber by the 1920s ended it. There are a few weathered original buildings, plus foundations of the sawmill, the docks, and the log-loading tramway that ran into the bay, and a historical marker.

🔴 It is a privately owned ghost town. It photographs beautifully and it appears on every “haunted Michigan” list, which is exactly why the owners are tired of visitors. Marker and roadside only.

Blaney Park — Schoolcraft County. Roadside; some buildings operating. Founded as plain “Blaney” in 1902 by the McEacheran Lumber Company, and remade from the 1930s to the 1950s as a resort for the wealthy and famous — which is why the abandoned buildings here are a hotel complex rather than a mining camp. ⚠ Several buildings have since been renovated and are in use (lodging, a bird sanctuary, a hunting preserve), so this is a mixed site, not an empty one. On US-2, an easy stop between the Mackinac Bridge and Manistique.

Nahma — Delta County. Roadside. NOT a ghost town. Established 1881 by the Bay de Noquet Lumber Company of Oconto, Wisconsin; at its peak it employed over 1,500 and built the housing and stores. The company closed in 1951 and the story went national when it sold the entire town to an Indiana playground manufacturer, who meant to turn it into a resort and never found the money.

⭐ Nahma survived by being sold off house by house. It is inhabited today — individually owned homes and businesses, the Nahma Inn still open. It belongs on the list as the counter-example: the company town that did not die.

Seney — Schoolcraft County. Roadside. NOT a ghost town. Began as a railroad stop in 1881 and grew past 3,000 people, with a reputation as the roughest town in the state — “Hell Town in the Pine,” and the saloons earned it. The pine was gone by the end of the century, the fires finished it, and the lumber companies left. Fewer than 200 people now.

🔴 The wild town is not there. What survives is a village and a gateway to the Seney National Wildlife Refuge. Go for the refuge; do not go looking for the saloons.

White Pine — Ontonagon County. Roadside. 🔴 NOT a ghost town. Six miles south of Lake Superior at the base of the Keweenaw. 339 people at the 2020 census, a census-designated place, and visibly a 1950s company town — single-storey ranch houses, trailer parks and apartment blocks laid out for a workforce that largely preferred to commute and never fully arrived.

The mine is the story. Copper was found in an outcrop on the Mineral River in 1880; the first attempt closed in 1882, Calumet & Hecla tried again from 1907, and the Copper Range Company worked it from 1953 to 1995, when mining stopped on the copper price rather than on exhaustion. Several decades of ore remain underground, and the workings are flooded. Lifetime production is put at roughly four billion pounds of copper and 45 million ounces of silver.

🔴 And it is not abandoned in the sense this dive uses. The ground is an active mineral project — tens of thousands of acres of surface and mineral rights in the hands of mining companies, with the deposit still under evaluation and the ownership changing hands as recently as this year. Private industrial land with a live commercial interest in it is the least promising combination on the whole list.

⭐ Go for the contrast, not the ruins. White Pine and Nonesuch, in the Porkies nearby, sit on the same copper: one is a roofless masonry ruin in the woods that anyone may walk to, the other is a town with a school. The difference is sixty years and one company’s decision about when to stop.

5.4 The Marquette Iron Range — the one new find worth a detour

Old Town Negaunee — Marquette County. Look, don’t enter. ⭐ The best thing found while filling this list in. A portion of the city of Negaunee was abandoned because of the risk of mine subsidence — the ground under it is undermined and liable to collapse. It is a piece of a living city that had to be evacuated and fenced, which makes it a genuinely different category from every logging and mining camp above: not a town that ran out of work, a town that ran out of ground.

🔴 Subsidence is the hazard, and it is not visible. This is a place to look at from the marked public side and photograph. There is nothing to be gained by crossing a fence that exists because the earth is hollow underneath it.

5.5 The Thumb

Port Crescent — Huron County. Walk in. Originally called Pinnepog, and a serious lumber town from 1864 to 1881: seventeen city blocks and over 500 people, with two sawmills, hotels, a boarding house, two salt plants, a school, a barrel works, a wagon factory, a grist mill, a boot and shoe factory, two blacksmiths, a post office, a railroad depot, a roller rink, a brewery, a pump factory, a telegraph office and a church.

The Port Huron Fire of 1871 and the Thumb Fire of 1881 took the timber, and with it the town. By 1894 every building was gone.

What is left is one chimney — the last of the mill — on the Steel Bridge Trail in Port Crescent State Park (state park since 1959).

⭐ A single chimney and seventeen city blocks is the most efficient lesson on this whole list. It is also, for a southern-Michigan trip, by far the easiest ghost town to reach.

Grindstone City — Huron County. Roadside. The first major industry in the upper Thumb, cutting the best grindstones in the world; population about 1,500 by 1888.

🔴 It was killed by an invention, not by exhaustion — and not even a deliberate one. In 1893 Edward G. Acheson made artificial carborundum while trying to manufacture fake diamonds. Synthetic abrasive destroyed the natural-grindstone trade and the quarries stopped paying. Grindstones are still scattered all over the village — in storefronts, in front yards, along the streets, and set into a stone wall.

Huron City — Huron County. Open, with rules — and 🔴 the hours in circulation are wrong. On M-25 halfway between Port Austin and Port Hope, on the tip of the Thumb. Founded as a lumber town in 1854 by Langdon Hubbard; most of the eleven buildings on the ten-acre site post-date the 1881 Thumb fire, which burned the first town out. It is preserved and run by the William Lyon Phelps Foundation, set up in 1947 for the Yale professor of English who summered here, preached in the Huron City church, and wrote at the House of Seven Gables (1883).

🔴 The museums’ own website publishes a far shorter season than the secondary listings do: Fridays and Saturdays only, in July and August only, 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. A widely repeated listing advertises July through Labor Day, Friday through Monday, 10 to 5 — two extra days a week and an extra month. ⭐ The owner’s own page wins. This is precisely the error that costs a four-hour round trip: arriving on a Sunday in September to a locked gate.

Guided tours only, and there are two. The village — log cabin, Huron City church, community house and hotel, the United States Life-Saving Service station, the general store — and the House of Seven Gables. An hour each, two hours for both. $10 village · $10 Seven Gables · $15 both · $5 for children 12–16 · under 12 free. Cash or cheque; no cards.

⭐ This is the best-preserved site in the Thumb, and it turns two fragments into a loop. Huron City, the single chimney at Port Crescent and the scattered grindstones of Grindstone City are all within a short drive — and unlike the other two, this one has eleven standing buildings and someone to explain them. ⚠ Check the calendar before the tank.

5.6 The west side, and one town that is genuinely gone

Singapore — Allegan County, near Saugatuck. Nothing to see — and go anyway.

Founded 1837 by Oshea Wilder at the mouth of the Kalamazoo River. At its peak: about 200 people, 25 to 40 houses, four lumber mills, a general store, and a busy harbour.

🔴 Singapore was killed by its own product. Its mills cut the timber that rebuilt Chicago and other Midwestern cities after the fires of 1871 — and with the trees gone, nothing held the dunes. The sand advanced about ten feet a year. Photographs exist of houses buried to the rooftops. The town was abandoned by the mid-1870s and had been swallowed by the 1920s; by the 1970s it was entirely gone. “Michigan’s Pompeii” is the local phrase and it is fair.

⚠ Do not drive here expecting ruins. There is a historical marker, a dune, and a story. ⭐ It is worth the stop as the clearest cautionary tale in the state — the only town on this list destroyed by the direct physical consequence of the industry that built it.

Nirvana — Cherry Valley Township, Lake County. Roadside — and ⭐ the land around it matters more than the town. Platted in 1874 by Darwin Knight, its first postmaster, beside the Flint & Pere Marquette Railroad in a stand of premium white pine. He named it for the Buddhist highest heaven and called one of its hotels the Indra House. Eleven sawmills worked the surrounding pine; when the pine was gone, so was the reason for the town.

🔴 The township’s own page is blunt about both halves of it — after the lumber boom “the town disappeared”, and what stands today is a small community of houses and the township hall on Kings Highway just north of US-10. Nothing survives from the timber days. The Cherry Valley Township cemetery, west of the settlement, is the usual last survivor; ⚠ its exact position comes from genealogy indexes rather than from the township, so it is not pinned here.

⭐ THE USEFUL FACT: over three quarters of Cherry Valley Township lies inside the Pere Marquette State Forest. That makes this state ground — the PR4134 card, the fifty-feet-from-the-road rule, the one-mile rule, and no water setback at all — and not the Huron-Manistee’s 200 feet, although the national forest is close enough to walk into. 🔴 The two ownerships interleave here with nothing on the ground to mark the change, and their water rules are opposites. Carry the ownership layer offline; see vol 12.

Walhalla — Branch Township, Mason County. Roadside. ⚠ NOT a ghost town. On US-10 between Baldwin and Ludington, a little over a mile north of the Pere Marquette River. It began as a railroad stop and was called Merritt and then Manistee Junction before Walhalla, and the settlement moved when US-10 was built. It had a depot, a store and a post office. ⚠ Reported peak population is about 800 — a figure from local press and popular histories rather than a census, and not verified here.

What is there now is a living community. Branch Township counted 1,405 people at the 2020 census. A few derelict buildings stand along the highway — the closed Lone Oak restaurant is the one people photograph — while Barothy Lodge, opened in 1931, is still in business on the river.

⭐ Its value to this project is position, not ruins. Walhalla sits in the middle of the ground the River and Lake Camps and State Forest Rivers dives cover. 🔴 And the Pere Marquette corridor beside it is designated-sites-only — the one river within reach where dispersed camping is not an option at all. Drive through; sleep by the plan in vol 12.

5.7 What the gap-fill changed

Three entries got promoted to worth-a-trip: Mandan (standing houses in the woods), Old Town Negaunee (a city block evacuated for subsidence), and Port Crescent (one chimney, and the easiest ghost town in the Lower Peninsula to reach).

Three got demoted out of the category entirely: Alberta, Nahma and Seney are inhabited towns, and Blaney Park is half in business.

And one — Shelldrake — moved the other way, from “worth a look” to private property, roadside only, which is the more useful fact about it.

A second pass then cleared the last five names, and four of the five came back negative. ⭐ Only Huron City earned a trip — eleven preserved buildings and the best thing in the Thumb, behind a two-day week and a two-month season that most listings get wrong. White Pine, Nirvana and Walhalla are all still inhabited and hold nothing standing from their own era, and Copper Falls is reported private, so it is left unpinned rather than guessed at.

🔴 That is the finding of the gap-fill, stated twice over: of twenty-six names checked across two passes, most were not what the lists promised. A gazetteer earns its place by saying which ones are a cornfield.