Yesterday dawned cold, gray and threatening rain. It
was in the low 40’s both nights and never got above the mid 50’s all day
yesterday, although by mid-afternoon the sky was blue……beautiful but cold and
windy. Back to gray and cold this morning, the promised sunshine and
warm-up didn’t arrive until mid-afternoon.
We spent yesterday morning browsing through the Gitche Gumee
Museum a block from the campground, named after the Ojibwe name for Lake
Superior. Anyone familiar with Longfellow’s “Song of Hiawatha” will
recognize the name. The museum is a tiny place but packed with all sorts
of interesting things. The owner, Karen, grew up in Grand Marais and is
very knowledgeable about both local history and rocks. The business is
part museum (which could never support anyone with the $1.00 price of
admission) and part shop where she sells jewelry and rocks. There was so
much in the museum it would have taken days to read it all. We recognized
a lot of the rocks she was selling as coming from the same wholesale suppliers
we bought from for years.
The Gitche Gumee Museum (in the building, not the
boat). The boat, named the Shark, was a fishing boat handmade by Axel
Niemi and his father. Axel was a fascinating character, a native of Grand
Marais who started the museum many years ago. This is the
strangest-looking boat we’ve ever seen. We couldn’t figure out how one
could fish from it. Karen knew Axel all her life. She’s the
second owner of the museum since Axel sold it.
When the weather cleared later we went out to Coast Guard
Point which is the divider between the open lake and the harbor. Grand
Marais was officially designated a Harbor of Refuge in the late 1800’s after
ships kept wrecking trying to get to safety in the harbor. One of them
sank right in the entrance to the harbor which made a mess of shipping for
years. The Harbor of Refuge improvements could have been built for a
fraction of what was lost in shipping revenue during that period. A
Life-Saving Station was built here which later became a Coast Guard station
after the Life-Saving Service and the Marine Revenue Service were combined to
form the Coast Guard. Congress was pretty slow back in those days, too,
because it took them 16 years to appropriate funds to build the living-saving
station after they authorized it in 1882. The Light House Board was also
incorporated into the Coast Guard in 1939.
The lighthouse keeper’s quarters at Coast Guard Point.
This replaced the previous quarters which consisted of a shanty built by the
first light keeper which was so inadequate it’s unbelievable that anyone could
survive a winter in it. (Not surprisingly, he quit four years before the
new quarters were built.) When the new quarters were finished in 1908 the
first thing the light keeper did was petition the Light House Board for funds
to build a privy which the board had forgotten to include with the building.
Rear range light on harbor side.
Front range light on breakwater on lake side.
These are range lights, something I’d never heard of.
Unlike regular lighthouses which warn ships away from danger, range lights are
used to navigate towards something like this harbor. Navigators followed
a line created by keeping the front light lined up with the rear light to get
into the harbor. Looks like tricky business because if they headed right
for the front range light (the small one in the lower picture) they’d end up on the
rocks so they really had to know what they were doing. The original
lights were white but were too hard to see against the lights of the town so
they were changed to red.
Grand Marais has a very picturesque little harbor. It saved many a ship from the storms of Lake Superior.
The original post office has been turned into a very
interesting little museum. It’s another place I could have spent much
more time. This town has a wealth of history for such a small
out-of-the-way place, most of it having to do with logging, shipping and
railroading. The logging industry put Grand Marais on the map, expanding
its population rapidly to 3000. Logs needed transporting which required
ships. Ships needed a port. Then the logs needed a sawmill and more
transporting…..shipping again plus a railroad. Even before the
log-shipping business got going there were ships going back and forth along the
coast from the Soo and Duluth. So many of them wrecked in Superior’s infamous
storms this was known as the “Shipwreck Coast,” reminding us of the Graveyard
of the Atlantic along North Carolina’s Outer Banks.
When logging ended it nearly destroyed the town and it’s
been struggling to survive ever since. The sawmill closed down after a
few years and the railroad was no longer needed. The townspeople mounted
a big campaign to keep the railroad here but they were unsuccessful. To
add insult to injury, the last train that left Grand Marais pulled up the
tracks behind it.
Two of the very attractive houses in town.
Today we drove 45 miles west through the Pictured Rocks
National Lakeshore to Munising, stopping at Miner’s Castle along the way.
This is the only place any part of the colorful cliffs of the Lakeshore can be viewed
from land.
Miner's Castle
View of the water from 200 feet above
The boat tour of the Pictured Rocks didn’t even run the past
two days because of the weather. We were planning on doing the tour today
but the weather stayed cold and gray until it was too late for us to do
it. We saw a long line of people getting on the tour boat so we might not
have been able to get tickets that late anyway. I was very disappointed
to miss the tour but it was the first time this year we’ve missed something
because of weather so we’ve been very lucky.
We stopped off at Munising Falls at the west end of the
park. As with all the other creeks and rivers we’ve seen up here, the
water is the color of dark tea from tannin.
Jim thought this Shell station price board was worthy of a
picture, and it wasn’t the only station with these prices. We have NEVER
seen diesel at $.26 less than regular gas! If oil companies can do it here,
why not other places?
Last stop of the day was back in Grand Marais at the Pickle
Barrel Museum which we missed by ten minutes yesterday (because I was poking
about in the Old Post Office Museum). The Teenie Weenies were
cartoon characters from a comic strip which debuted in the Chicago Tribune in
1914 (which we’d never seen or heard of). William Donahey, creator of the
characters, did several ads for Reid-Murdoch and Company for the Monarch Food
Line which, among other things, made pickles which were packed in miniature oak
barrels. In 1926, as a surprise for William and Mary Donahey,
Reid-Murdoch had this house built by the barrel-building company as a
large-scale version of the miniature pickle barrels. It was erected on
Grand Sable Lake just west of here as a vacation home for the Donaheys.
Naturally there was a lot of publicity about the house and the Donaheys were
swamped with non-stop visitors, sometimes as many as 200 a day. After ten
years they couldn’t stand the lack of privacy any longer so gave the house
away. It was moved to Grand Marais and the Donaheys built a log cabin on
the same land which they continued to enjoy for many years. The Pickle
Barrel was an ice cream shop for a while, and an information kiosk and a gift
shop, but it wasn’t maintained and fell into a terrible state of
disrepair. The Grand Marais Historical Society acquired the property and
restored it to its present excellent condition. The big barrel is the
living room and upstairs bedroom. The small barrel is the kitchen. The two are joined by a pantry.
This is a really interesting little town with a great
history. If if weren’t a tedious hour’s drive to a grocery store it would
be a wonderful place to spend a month. There are quite a few summer
residents here and lots of people stay in the campground all summer so they’ve
obviously found a way around the inconveniences.
View of the lake yesterday evening. The character of
the lake changes often. It reminds us of what the Irish say…..”if you
don’t like our weather, wait five minutes.”
Tomorrow we’re off to the Soo for the 2 ½ day Smith family
reunion.
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