Munising, Michigan

Munising is a city on the southern shore of Lake Superior on the Upper Peninsula of the U.S. state of Michigan. The population was 2,355 at the 2010 census. It is the county seat of Alger County. The city is adjacent to the northwest corner of Munising Township, but is administratively autonomous.

History

The name for the city comes from the Ojibwe word for "island at". A post office was established as the Munising post office on December 22, 1868. It was renamed as Gogarnville on October 23, 1889, when Julius Gogarn was appointed as postmaster. The office was moved to his farm. He was a German-born American Civil War veteran and first Supervisor of Munising Township. That post office continued until July 15, 1893 (46°25′30″N 86°37′31″W / 46.42500°N 86.62528°W / 46.42500; -86.62528 (Gogarnville Post Office)).

Geography

Munising is located on the southern edge of Munising Bay at 46°24′40″N 86°38′52″W / 46.41111°N 86.64778°W / 46.41111; -86.64778, also known as the South Bay of Grand Island Harbor, across from Grand Island around the mouth of the Anna River. It is the primary embarkation point for cruises to Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore and Grand Island National Recreation Area.

Michigan

Michigan ⁱ/ˈmɪʃᵻɡən/ is a state located in the Great Lakes and midwestern regions of the United States. The name Michigan is the French form of the Ojibwa word mishigamaa, meaning "large water" or "large lake". Michigan is the tenth most populous of the 50 United States, with the 11th most extensive total area (the largest state by total area east of the Mississippi River). Its capital is Lansing, and the largest city is Detroit.

Michigan is the only state to consist of two peninsulas. The Lower Peninsula, to which the name Michigan was originally applied, is often noted to be shaped like a mitten. The Upper Peninsula (often referred to as "the U.P.") is separated from the Lower Peninsula by the Straits of Mackinac, a five-mile (8 km) channel that joins Lake Huron to Lake Michigan. The two peninsulas are connected by the Mackinac Bridge. The state has the longest freshwater coastline of any political subdivision in the world, being bounded by four of the five Great Lakes, plus Lake Saint Clair. As a result, it is one of the leading U.S. states for recreational boating. Michigan also has 64,980 inland lakes and ponds. A person in the state is never more than six miles (9.7 km) from a natural water source or more than 85 miles (137 km) from a Great Lakes shoreline.

Upper Peninsula of Michigan

The Upper Peninsula is the northern of the two major peninsulas that make up the U.S. state of Michigan. It may also be referred to as the UP or Upper Michigan. The peninsula is bounded on the north by Lake Superior, on the east by the St. Marys River, on the southeast by Lake Michigan and Lake Huron, and on the southwest by Wisconsin.

The Upper Peninsula contains 29% of the land area of Michigan but just 3% of its total population. Residents are frequently called Yoopers (derived from "U.P.-ers") and have a strong regional identity. Large numbers of French Canadian, Finnish, Swedish, Cornish, and Italian immigrants came to the Upper Peninsula, especially the Keweenaw Peninsula, to work in the area's mines and lumber industry. The peninsula includes the only counties in the United States where a plurality of residents claim Finnish ancestry.

Ordered by size, the peninsula's largest cities are Marquette, Sault Ste. Marie, Escanaba, Menominee, Houghton, and Iron Mountain. The land and climate are not very suitable for agriculture because of the long harsh winters. The economy has been based on logging, mining, and tourism. Most mines have closed since the "golden age" from 1890 to 1920. The land is heavily forested and logging remains a major industry.

Lake Superior

Lake Superior (French: Lac Supérieur) is the largest of the Great Lakes of North America. The lake is shared by Canada's Ontario to the north, the United States' Minnesota to the west, and the United States' Wisconsin and Michigan to the south. It is generally considered the largest freshwater lake in the world by surface area. It is the world's third-largest freshwater lake by volume and the largest by volume in North America.

Name

The Ojibwe call the lake gichi-gami (pronounced as gitchi-gami and kitchi-gami in other dialects), meaning "be a great sea." Henry Wadsworth Longfellow wrote the name as "Gitche Gumee" in The Song of Hiawatha, as did Gordon Lightfoot in his song, "The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald". According to other sources the actual Ojibwe name is Ojibwe Gichigami ("Ojibwe's Great Sea") or Anishinaabe Gichigami ("Anishinaabe's Great Sea"). The 1878 dictionary by Father Frederic Baraga, the first one written for the Ojibway language, gives the Ojibwe name as Otchipwe-kitchi-gami (reflecting Ojibwe Gichigami). The first French explorers approaching the great inland sea by way of the Ottawa River and Lake Huron during the 17th century referred to their discovery as le lac supérieur. Properly translated, the expression means "Upper Lake," that is, the lake above Lake Huron. The lake was also called Lac Tracy (named for Alexandre de Prouville de Tracy) by 17th century Jesuit missionaries. The British, upon taking control of the region from the French in the 1760s following the French and Indian War, anglicized the lake's name to Superior, "on account of its being superior in magnitude to any of the lakes on that vast continent."

Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore

Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore is a U.S. National Lakeshore on the shore of Lake Superior in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, United States. It extends for 42 miles (67 km) along the shore and covers 73,236 acres (114 sq mi; 296 km²). The park offers spectacular scenery of the hilly shoreline between Munising, Michigan and Grand Marais, Michigan, with various rock formations like natural archways, waterfalls, and sand dunes.

Pictured Rocks derives its name from the 15 miles (24 km) of colorful sandstone cliffs northeast of Munising. The cliffs are up to 200 feet (60 m) above lake level. They have been naturally sculptured into shallow caves, arches, formations that resemble castle turrets, and human profiles, among others. Near Munising visitors also can view Grand Island, most of which is included in the Grand Island National Recreation Area and is preserved separately.

The U.S. Congress made Pictured Rocks the first officially designated National Lakeshore in the United States in 1966. It is governed by the National Park Service (NPS), had 22 year-round NPS employees as of May 2006, and received 476,888 visitors in 2005.