HISTORY · HISTORICAL MARKER
20th-Century Grand Portage
History
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Ojibwe elders at Grand Portage still remember the little village along the lakefront in the early 20th century, where children might have ridden on the first road from Duluth to Thunder Bay, old US Highway 61, after it opened in the 1920s, and a spur ran into the village where the reconstructed Depot stands today. In 1941, just under 200 Ojibwe people lived in Grand Portage and another 100 in Grand Marais, earning a living by commercial fishing, hunting, guiding, and making handicrafts, while gardens and hunting provided a quarter of their food. With the opening of the new North Shore Highway, Highway 61, in the 1960s, the community turned away from the lake toward the road. The oldest Catholic church in the state is visible ahead, up the hill. In 1958, the Grand Portage Band donated half the land for Grand Portage National Monument to the National Park Service. The small midwestern village was replaced by the reconstructed Depot and Ojibwe Village from the eighteenth century, and tourism and forestry became the main sources of jobs.
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Grand Marais, Minnesota
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