Grand Marais MI – Harbor of Safe Refuge, Part 2

It's said Grand Marais is the oldest non-Native place name on Lake Superior.  Maybe that's so, but it only figures haggard crews of vaguely white guys muscling wave battered canoes across open seas had occasion to call it other things, prior.

Some variation on safe refuge, I'd think. Thank god appended, depending.

In French, Grand Marais means great marsh. Since it's historically been a harbor not a marsh, some folk think the name got mistranslated from maré, or pond. No one knows for sure.

The town’s story is in many ways typical to white settlement along the Superior Basin, though exacerbated by isolation even in a region noted for it. Below, at the very end of the faraway point you can just make out the light standard detailed at the top of this page.

That ever-shifting mountain of sand hems the place in from the west. And what you don't know about the big water beyond won't hurt you unless you're on it, in which case it could kill you. This stretch of Superior nurses a wicked mean hunger for boats of all sizes.

Indians lived in and around these parts maybe ten thousand years. Then suddenly (as such things go), mostly they didn't. Despite the all-seeing eye of the ether, what natives called the spot before any white man ever thought of it remains unknown to me.

The first European on record visited in 1658. He seemed to like the place. Voyageurs came and went. In time, a trading post was built and a nascent village gathered around that. Commercial fishing commenced during the 1860's.

In the 1870's the lumbermen arrived. Soon, those were as locusts.

Civilization brought the requisite railway, saloons, a hospital, banks and a livery. Even a cigar factory, speaking to terminal isolation. Population peaked at over 2,000 souls. Grand Marais thrived until the first decade of the 20th century.

The lumber played out. Millworks closed. The locusts moved on.

Cook Curtis & Miller Sawmill machinery building

The train stopped running in 1910. Afterwards, you could either catch a packet freighter running this way then that along the lake or the stage from also isolated Seney, where at least they still had a train. To that point, the town shares much the same narrative as Fayette and Nahma to the south.

Except Lake Superior isn't Lake Michigan, so Grand Marais didn't suffer their fate. Commercial fishing helped sustain the place until after the first lamprey arrived in Superior courtesy of the Welland Canal, no later than 1938.

Then like the Indians, the pine and the train after that, soon the lake trout too were mostly gone.

For enterprise, what remained of the little boom & bust settlement turned primarily to tourism. That's about where we came in.

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When Heather and I first visited Grand Marais, Jim Harrison might be found holding court at the Dunes Saloon, now called the Lake Superior Brewing Company. Harrison's camp was out near the Blind Sucker River.

One of the all-time great river names, that used to be the more prosaic 'Sucker River' lumbermen floated logs down. Later it was converted to a spring fed swamp and rechristened the 'Dead Sucker River'. Today, the Sucker runs officially Blind into the big lake.

By any name, from there Grand Marais is pretty well locked in by wilderness and wild water all the way east to Whitefish Point. That's a long way.

Jim Harrison's gone. Bertha Chilson's Cozy Corner Café now houses the Grand Marais Outfitters. On the town’s register of historic buildings, the retrofit is said to have made the first ‘green’ building in Alger County.

Even with that, Grand Marais still hosts a classic American diner. This one salvaged and relocated more than once, now restored to gleaming glory just down the curling harbor walk from Bertha’s old joint.

Ellen Airgood went to Grand Marais on a camping trip and fell in love.

Together with her husband Rick, they rescued a dilapidated diner of Pennsylvanian origin from a field in Illinois. Hauled that sucker up over the Mackinaw Bridge, which must’ve been quite the sight. Then with much love and hard work, at the edge of the wilderness they gave it new life as the West Bay Diner & Delicatessen.

Like Bertha Chilson before them, Ellen and Rick offer fine fare served with generosity of spirit from a smallish space in the most splendid of settings.

As if that's not enough, Ellen also made herself an Upper Peninsula author of note. Like Jim Harrison before her, she’s inspired by Grand Marais’ rich sense of history and place. From an interview with National Public Radio about her novel South of Superior:

“I really wanted to write about the north… I think it’s full of characters that I’m not sure they make people like this anymore – very independent, self-reliant, full of capability… You might almost be in another time, only you’re not. It’s a little bit magical.

To me the lake is a character. It shapes the community. It shapes the people. It shapes the personalities, the attitude towards life.”

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After the Odyssey ended, the Kingston Plains was the site I most needed to work more. The place nags me. I positively pine for it.

Happily, the Plains is near storied Grand Marais. Still a harbor of safe refuge, as the voracious appetite of windblown sand, wild water and complex history combined somehow haven’t yet managed to eat it.

So should you one day make it off the road, out of the woods or in from Superior exhausted and hungry, haven waits at the great marsh (or pond). As it has for centuries.

And thank god for that, since all manner of safe refuge is necessary when trying to take full account of a wilderness called the Kingston Plains.

From the safety of Grand Marais, we'll head there next...