Michigan's ghost towns: Shadows on the landscape

In the 1870s, the Upper Peninsula town of Fayette had 500 residents, an iron smelting operation and dozens of buildings. Today, 19 remain, preserved within the 711-acre confines of Fayette Historic State Park.

In the not-so-distant past, the town of Vickeryville, northwest of Lansing in Montcalm County, had a U.S. Post Office, a train depot, a resident doctor and its own school.

Some of the abandoned towns that dot Michigan's landscape from the tip of the Keweenaw Peninsula to the Ohio and Indiana state lines are no more than outlines of foundations or a few weathered cemetery headstones. A few, like Fayette, are preserved as historical sites. Others still have a handful of homes.

All speak to boom-and-bust cycles in Michigan's history.

"These are towns where the industry moved on, or the railroad closed, or the Post Office closed," said Roger Rosentreter, former editor of Michigan History magazine who now is a visiting professor at Michigan State University. He teaches — what else? — Michigan history.

The Keweenaw Peninsula, jutting into Lake Superior from the north side of the U.P., was the source of some of the purest copper on earth. Towns would rise alongside mines or smelting operations and fall when they closed. Central, Cliff, Mandan, Gay, Old Victoria, Delaware and Phoenix are to name but a few.

"Central, at one time, had 130 buildings," said Larry Molloy, professor emeritus at Oakland Community College and an author and lecturer on Keweenaw history who splits his time between the Novi and the Keweenaw community of Eagle Harbor. "Delaware had several hundred buildings and now they're down to two."

In the western U.S., a remote ghost town could stand for years in relatively good repair thanks to a dry climate, Molloy said. Michigan's lush environment is different.

"Primarily because the winters are so wet, most of the buildings have disappeared," he said. "If they just stood abandoned over two to three winters, Mother Nature began to take her course."

Scavengers also made off with usable lumber from many of the mining settlements.

"As the towns would close, people would literally tear the buildings down and take the wood to build another town," Molloy said.

Copper Falls, for example, once had several stores and even enough people to support a photography studio.

"When you drive through this town today, what you will see is a sign that the county put up that says 'Copper Falls,'" Molloy said. "There's one relatively new house kind of in the center."

The Keweenaw National Historic Park, established in 1992, works with local organizations to preserve Michigan's copper industry heritage sites, Molloy said. He said the Keweenaw could experience a boom in ghost-town visitors as more sites are made tourist-friendly.

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For example, Old Victoria's hand-hewn log cabins have been restored and summer tours are offered. Central, which once had a population of 1,200, now has some summer residents and a restored church where services are held each summer during an annual reunion.

Molloy said there's a growing effort to preserve and restore what remains.

"We'd like to have more than just abandoned foundations," he said.

For its part, Fayette — near Garden on the Garden Peninsula, which extends southward into Lake Michigan from the U.P. — had residents through the 1940s, said Randall Brown, supervisor of the state park that contains it.

For that reason, Brown doesn't prefer the term "ghost town" to describe Fayette.

There are no prairie dogs, no tumbleweeds, no stereotypical gunslingers. It was a nice 19th century village with a single reason for being.

"It was a company town," he said. "Jackson Iron Company owned everything that was happening in the town, so when they left, all the businesses left."

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Fayette was home to an iron smelter, with ore coming from a Negaunee mine. Ore was shipped to Escanaba by rail, then to Fayette by barge. The site had all three things needed to smelt raw iron ore into usable metal: limestone, hardwoods to make charcoal and a safe, deep harbor.

All but one of the 19 remaining structures are original; one is rebuilt. Some are set up as they would have been in the 19th century; others contain historical displays and information.

The Lower Peninsula includes many towns such as Vickeryville, between Carson City and Greenville among corn and soybean fields. Its decrepit grain elevator rises above an abandoned railroad bed. Its school closed in the mid-1960s. A few storefront-style buildings remain which now appear to be used for storage; there's a Methodist church established in 1889.

But the old town has had a bit of new life in recent years. It's home to an Old-Order Mennonite settlement whose members arrived from Indiana in 1992.

Michigan ghost towns

Here's a sampling of abandoned towns from around the state:

Freedom: This town, founded by African-Americans, had railroad service but no Post Office; its schoolhouse now is part of the Mackinaw Heritage Village in Mackinaw City.

Pere Cheney: This Crawford County town was established in 1873 and once had 1,500 people; diphtheria wiped out many in the 1890s. Little remains except a few headstones in its cemetery, which some claim is haunted.

Mentha: Founded by peppermint grower Albert Todd, it's located in Van Buren County with access by the Kal-Haven bicycle trail. A few remnants of buildings remain.

Rawsonville: This Wayne County hamlet is sort of like Atlantis — it boomed from the 1830s to the 1860s but disappeared under water when Belleville Lake was flooded in 1925.

Glen Haven, within the boundaries of Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore, is a former logging village that is being restored.