Escanaba's Docks

Escanaba's harbor long served as a major shipping center, with the decaying Chicago and Northwestern Railway Dock, locally called the Merchant's Dock, once handling most freight and passengers traveling to and from the South and East before the railroad connected with Green Bay, Wisconsin, in the 1870's. Another commercial dock owned by the I. Stephenson Lumber Company stood nearby, and the next dock north was the coal dock of the C. Reiss Coal Company of Green Bay, Wisconsin. Most harbor activity today takes place at the Chicago and Northwestern iron ore dock, where pelletized ore from large stockpiles is carried by conveyor belt into ore boats, and over eight million tons are shipped annually to Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, and the Detroit area, exceeding the tonnage once moved from the six old wooden docks. Before steamboats became common on the Great Lakes, pioneer settlers said Escanaba harbor was "a forest of masts" waiting for dockage. Farther north stands a terminal for high-test airplane fuel used at K. I. Sawyer Air Force Base near Gwinn, about fifty miles north. At the head of Little Bay de Noc are Gladstone and Kipling; Gladstone once had its own ore dock and grain elevator, and Kipling is an oil terminal for several oil companies. Across the bay, the Stonington Peninsula was first settled, after the Indians, by predominately Scandinavian farmers and fishermen. Its low-lying limestone consists of Ordovician strata laid by tropical seas between two hundred and three hundred million years ago, and fossils found there include brachiopods, ostrocods, and trilobite fragments. Just off Sand Point, a buoy marks the sunken hulk of the steamer Nahant, which burned in Escanaba harbor, drifted, and sank there.

Escanaba, Michigan · United States