7 Old-World Towns to Visit in the Great Lakes
The Great Lakes are lined with towns that still feel a hundred years old, and wandering them is half the fun. You probably go for the beaches and the car ferries. What sticks with you, though, is everything else. The red lighthouses, the brick main streets, the little museums inside old train depots. These towns ring all five lakes, with a couple over the border in Ontario. Some began as forts and navy yards, others hauled lumber, iron ore, or fish, and one was laid out as a giant octagon.
Marquette, Michigan
Marquette was built to move iron. From the 1850s, ore came off the Marquette Range and shipped out across Lake Superior. For a couple of decades around 1880, the range outproduced everywhere else in the country. The 47-mile Iron Ore Heritage Trail now follows those old rail grades, past rusting mine headframes and the Victorian storefronts left from the boom.
The Marquette Maritime Museum is right beside the red harbor lighthouse. A light has steered ore boats in since 1853, though the current brick tower dates to 1866. Downtown is still built from the sandstone the mines paid for.
Ludington, Michigan
The SS Badger has hauled cars and passengers across Lake Michigan from Ludington to Manitowoc, Wisconsin, since 1953. It is the last working coal-fired steamer in the country, and it still sails in season. Before the ferries, this was white-pine country. Fourteen sawmills once ringed Pere Marquette Lake, and that era survives at Historic White Pine Village, thirty-odd buildings that include the 1849 county courthouse.
Out at Ludington State Park, the 1867 Big Sable Point Lighthouse rises 112 feet over the dunes, a 1.8-mile walk in through the jack pines. A 1935 beach house built by the Civilian Conservation Corps stands nearby. The Mason County Cultural Trails add self-guided driving routes through the area's lumber and maritime past.
Port Washington, Wisconsin
Up on the bluff over Port Washington's harbor stands a Greek Revival light station from 1860, built where an older 1849 light once stood. It is a museum now, with a replica Fresnel lens at the top of the tower. The 1830s downtown below still has its Italianate brick storefronts from its days as a working fishing port.
Coal Dock Park used to take in the coal that fed the power plant. The coal is long gone, and the point is green space now. The Port Exploreum tells the town's maritime story with hands-on exhibits. Every July, Port Fish Days puts on a fish fry and parade for the old fishing fleet.
Grand Haven, Michigan
Grand Haven got its start as a sawmill town. A company platted the village in 1834 at the mouth of the Grand River and floated millions of board feet of white pine out onto Lake Michigan. The 1870 railroad depot on the waterfront now holds part of the Tri-Cities Historical Museum. The Victorian storefronts along Washington Avenue went up in the same boom. It has been a Coast Guard town since 1877, and still celebrates that every summer.
Out on the south pier, the red lighthouse is younger than it looks. A light has marked the harbor since 1839, but the steel tower and its catwalk date only to 1905.
Goderich, Ontario
Goderich has the most unusual layout of the bunch. When the Canada Company set it up in 1827, founder John Galt drew the whole downtown before anyone built a thing. Streets fan out like spokes from an eight-sided central square. That octagon, borrowed from the Roman architect Vitruvius, is still the center of town.
On the bluff above the harbor, the square stone Goderich Lighthouse has stood since 1847, the oldest on the Canadian side of Lake Huron. Just inland, the eight-sided Huron Historic Gaol held prisoners into the 1970s. The Huron County Museum tells the rest of the story.
Fort Erie, Ontario
Old Fort Erie is the reason most people know the town. The squat stone fort guards the spot where the Niagara River pulls out of Lake Erie. In 1814 it saw one of the longest, bloodiest sieges of the War of 1812. It is quieter now, apart from the August weekend when reenactors refight the whole siege in full uniform.
The Fort Erie Railway Museum holds the town's rail story, and the Bridgeburg district by the Peace Bridge lines the river with old storefronts.
Sackets Harbor, New York
For a little place, Sackets Harbor punched way above its weight. During the War of 1812 it was the US Navy's main base on Lake Ontario, where shipwrights raced the British to build the biggest warships on the water. Two battles played out on what is now the Sackets Harbor Battlefield State Historic Site.
Next door, the limestone Madison Barracks went up in 1816, named for a president barely out of office. Zebulon Pike is buried in its cemetery. The village never got big. West Main Street still leads down to the water past the same limestone and clapboard buildings.
The Older Side of the Great Lakes
These towns are old, and glad of it. Ludington still sends a coal-fired ferry across the lake. Marquette turned its old ore-rail beds into a trail. Sackets Harbor still has the limestone barracks from its days as a navy yard. None of them turned their backs on that past, which is why they still feel like another century. The water built every one of them, and it still shows.
