Summer Trip Day 1 - a Good Day

 As you may already know, Hubby and I took a short trip to the eastern UP last week. It was a long-anticipated trip, and we had high hopes that it would be a wonderful and relaxing time. Many of you know how that turned out, but let me start with the first day on the road, as that was a pretty good one.

            It was Hannah’s first big road trip with us, and she was totally onboard with it.

            We took a lot of short potty breaks, but the first big stop we made was at Fayette State Park, just under 220 miles from home.  I’ve been there two or there times before, but any place that has historic buildings is fascinating to me.

            Between 1867 and 1891, Fayette was an industrial community that manufactured charcoal pig iron. It is located on the Big Bay de Noc of Lake Michigan, between Snail Shell Harbor and Sand Bay, about nine miles south west of the tiny town of Garden.

The blast furnaces at Fayette produced a total of 229,288 tons of iron during 24 years of operation, using local hardwood forests for fuel and quarrying limestone from the bluffs to purify the iron ore. When the charcoal iron market began to decline, the Jackson Iron Company closed its Fayette smelting operations in 1891.

Over the years since then, the property had several owners, but in general, the old buildings fell into disrepair.  

In 1959, the state of Michigan acquired the site, restoring many of the buildings and turning it into a state park. The town has been reconstructed into a living museum, showing what life was like in this town in the late 19th century.