AuTrain, from a French term meaning “at the shortcut or traverse,” was one of the earliest places visited by white men traveling along Lake Superior’s south shore, and its river formed part of an ancient Indian route between Lakes Superior and Michigan. One of Alger County’s oldest settlements, it was first inhabited by white men in 1856 when William Cameron began hunting and trapping there. Royal Whittlesey built a sawmill in 1862, logging of Norway pine for dock pilings began, and later white pine was hewed into squared timbers for shipment to England. By 1872 the Sault Ste. Marie & Grand Island State Road Extension reached the village. Ojibwa Indians lived in the area and used the bluff west of the village as a lookout and fur packing station, with a field of corn planted at its base. AuTrain’s population rose sharply in 1877 when families moved from Bay Furnace near Munising after that iron-making community was destroyed by fire, and logging then expanded as the AuTrain River and its tributaries carried logs to mills there, in Lower Michigan, Rock River, Marquette, and later Munising. The Detroit, Mackinac & Marquette Railroad arrived in 1881, a school soon became the community’s social, political, and religious center, and a post office was established in 1883. In 1885, when the northern part of Schoolcraft County was organized as Alger County, AuTrain became the county seat; the next year a townsite was platted and a shingle mill was built, followed by a business district with stores, hotels, saloons, and the county’s first newspaper, the AuTrain Alpha. Commercial fishing became important, the railroad also brought growing numbers of tourists, settlers established homesteads south of the village on AuTrain Lake, and Charles Schaffer of Marquette, known as the “Charcoal King,” platted the village and donated land for the courthouse and cemetery. Brownstone quarried four miles west was used to build the county’s first jail in 1890. After the turn of the century, the Standard Tie Company carried out extensive logging operations, but by 1919 the last log drives ended on the AuTrain River. The county seat moved to Munising in 1902, and over its long history AuTrain served as an Indian and white transit and stopover point, a sawmill town, county seat, commercial fishing port, and resort center before tourism and recreation became its livelihood.