The Iron Giant -- Fayette, MI

As I worked the Linhof during my first visit to Fayette, a man approached. About my own age, he'd enthusiasm to spare and an obvious desire to share.

"I saw you carrying that camera down the hill," he said. "It looked like your hair was on fire."

By way of explanation I waved one arm wide, as if that might take everything in and also excuse the metaphorically flaming hair. He seemed to understand. Two strangers by prior inclination tossed together on a strange land. Few words passed between us. Few were needed because there we stood.

Fayette Historic Park isn't curated architectural aggregate like Old World Wisconsin. It's no reconstruction of a legendary past as at Old Fort William, which though admirable is today neither where it once was nor old.

Unlike Fayette, Nonesuch comes shrouded in wildness that eats it. Though by no means impenetrable, Nonesuch is mostly incomprehensible and always will be. What stands at Fayette stands plain.

Victoria's character is down-home gritty. At Victoria on any given autumn afternoon, as long light fails behind the ridge and a lone docent fires up an aged smoker to chase the chill, with a shiver you might yet catch an authentic hint of a real past. Pumpkins and corn stalks optional.

In 1951 abandoned Fayette was cast in administrative amber. That's when the Escanaba Paper Company swapped it to the State of Michigan for publicly owned timberland.

Fayette Historic Park  was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1970. The currently crumbling icon of Nahma is on that list too.

This is a ghost town shorn of ghosts. Under bright light it shines cold. Maybe because the only living thing that ever really mattered here was the fire, which is long gone. You wouldn't invite that back, even if you could.

Fayette first came online in 1867 along the eastern shore of Big Bay De Noc at Snail Shell Harbor, to take advantage of nearby Escanaba's then bustling commercial docks.

At Fayette the Jackson Iron Company built roaring charcoal kilns and blast furnaces fueled by local hardwood and limestone. The Company used those to transform their cut of the Iron Giant into more profitable pig iron.

A monument to this fiery enterprise remains, as at the burial site of a barbarian King.

Structures were built primarily of wood. Except the walls of the Company's last company store are lime mortar and brick.

Fayette's population likely peaked somewhere short of 500 people. Mostly, these were immigrant folk. Workers got paid monthly. In gold, they say. That's some Nice work if you can get it, as they say. Residential areas of the town were laid out strictly according to caste. In Fayette, you knew where you stood. There was a railroad.

A race track and baseball field were up the hill behind and above the furnaces. Woe be to you when you placed a bet on a horse or played a little ball while Fayette belched into a full fetch breeze off the lake. There was nowhere to go for the smoke and stench and flying bits of hellfire, save to follow you up and over the hill on your one day off.

Taverns and brothels were located beyond the playing fields. It's said the citizens of Fayette once torched a brothel as a penalty for sexual slavery.

The town boasted a theater. That's still on the second floor of the original wooden structure, accessible only via a single enclosed stairway. On a wall of the theater, preserved behind Plexiglas, you can read the signatures of traveling performers who once played there. It's a nice touch.

Yet each and every time I mount those narrow wooden stairs I recall Calumet's later Italian Hall disaster. What were any of these people thinking?

Did they just not believe they'd burn? How could that be? Especially at Fayette, considering why they were there. Bet no docent fires up that stage right smoker, these days.

In May of 1883 the furnaces were feared destroyed by the fire they were constructed to contain. How that can happen, I don't know. The Jackson Iron Company made repairs and in September production resumed. The charcoal iron market was by then in decline and market forces soon did to Fayette what fire couldn't, quite.

Midway through 1885, operations at the kilns and furnaces became intermittent. By 1891 they were done. Once set, industrial fire burned hot at Fayette, then was struck. The flame lasted twenty-four years.

The town changed hands. For a while, it was a resort. That too, failed.

These days, the trail down the peninsula toward Fayette Historic Park cuts through farm fields studded with towering wind turbines that look like massive inverted grasshoppers, broken legs spinning in the wind.

This enterprise is named The Heritage Garden Wind Farm. It's quite the undertaking. Likely, the garden's creators take actuarial certitude as in their long term favor. Over a broad stretch of land, they've claimed the horizon and much of the sky.

Critical elements of endeavor melded to time and place don't well translate. Not to words. Not to images. Not to administrative preserves. Nonetheless, at Fayette we've chosen perpetual maintenance, hoping the future will take a lesson and render better, more lasting product from history's raw makings than a postindustrial cemetery, where today rest the bones of an Iron Giant.

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As of this writing, should you head north across that wild water you'll still soon enough spy the leaning sawdust burner of Nahma, near the mouth of the Sturgeon River with no sturgeon. The burner was built circa 1888-1893, after wooden Nahma burnt one time too many.

Enterprise at Nahma and Fayette didn't coincide but briefly. The former was being born with the latter on its deathbed. Under any circumstance, one couldn't readily see the other, for the white limestone cliffs protecting Snail Shell Harbor.

I like to think one summer night two lovers made their way up those cliffs above failing Fayette, to forget their troubles and focus only on the moment. Then the deep red glow of newborn Nahma burning caught their eye. There'd have been just enough overlap between the two enterprises for someone to have seen that, from high enough ground during a sufficiently dark night.

In any event, at the administered ghost town that is Fayette, no spark left by any flame once called upon to build a modern world exists. What remains there is abstract reflection.