Michigan considered a land-based connection between the Lower and Upper Peninsula as early as the 1880s after the steamer Algomah failed as a winter ferry. On February 5, 1884, The Lansing Republican Tri-Weekly asked whether the crossing should be a bridge or a tunnel. In 1920, a proposed island-hopping series of bridges and causeways would have run from Cheboygan to St. Ignace, and engineers determined that a bridge was feasible. In 1937, engineering professor James H. Cissel prepared plans showing that a direct bridge crossing was feasible, leading the Bridge Authority to commission a feasibility study that in 1940 recommended a direct suspension bridge. Engineering plans and funding were secured at the end of 1953, and the bridge was completed in 1957 in time for the annual rush of deer hunters, after which car ferries in the Straits soon became a thing of the past.