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 Jeff originally asked 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. Not researched. Named in the sources, never checked.

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. Not researched.

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. Not researched. A preserved 19th-century village with a museum, per the sources; hours unchecked.

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 and Walhalla — Lake and Mason Counties. Not researched. Named in the sources, unchecked.

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.