Portage Canal
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Growing up around the Great Lakes affords many exciting adventures if you like water. Spending many summers in the upper peninsula, where my grandparents and other family members lived, I became particularly familiar with Lake Michigan along US Highway 2 and Lake Superior traversing US 41.
To begin with, the waterway Portage Canal was literally in my grandparent's backyard, the gateway for ships traveling from Keweenaw Bay to Lake Superior. This saved ore ships traveling to Lake Superior one hundred miles, creating economic income for the copper mines and small towns of Keweenaw County. Until the canal, separating the towns of Houghton and Hancock left the Hancock and adjoining Keweenaw communities as an island only accessible via ferries, small boats, and barges. Today it carries traffic comparable to the Mackinac Bridge as local residents and tourists can visit back and forth to local towns and tourist destinations such as Copper Harbor and the Porcupine Mountains as one travels the beautiful view of Lake Superior along Highway 41.
I can recall walking from my grandfather's barbershop in Houghton, west to the Portage Lift bridge and crossing to meet up with my aunt who worked at Volwerth's Sausage Company in Hancock. Friday evenings were an exciting time down at the dock behind my grandfather's shop, where the cruise ship The Ranger II would load and depart with tourists heading to the nature's paradise island of Isle Royale. We would hear its horn and race down the drive to listen to the band playing, and travelers tossing candy to the children watching on the dock.
Just down Sheldon Avenue from my grandparent's home above the barbershop was the Michigan Tech University. Beginning in 1885 as a mere group of four staff members and twenty-three students studying engineering improvements for the area's copper mines, it had now become a large campus, with an enrollment of over 3500 students and a faculty of nearly 300, providing a much-expanded curriculum including nuclear engineering and biological sciences to name a few. The growing student enrollment also offered expanded business for stores and restaurants as well as my grandfather's barbershop!
My grandfather's shop was eventually replaced by a hotel and new shops sprang up along Sheldon Avenue as well as along the highway affording students and residents more access to city-like establishments as well as economic growth for the area. The Keweenaw still maintains a beauty unmatched as the state leaves much of the land protected from urban growth.
