If you have been following me since the very beginning, this likely isn't the first time you have seen me talk about Fayette. If you haven't been following me, feel free to spend the next couple of hours scrolling through three years worth of posts to find it.
Or, just read this post.
This past weekend my wife and I went camping up in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. We stayed at a state park in Manistique which is just down the road from one of our favorite spots to visit. Fayette is a cool old iron smelting town on the shores of lake Michigan.
Although I have visited Fayette countless times over the years, the views keep me coming back. You actually can't see the town from the parking area. You need to talk down a steep hill and round a bend before the townsite unfolds in front of you.
recently got a new phone, a OnePlus 9Pro, so this trip really gave me the opportunity to test it out. I am pretty happy with the photos I got.
On this particular trip we took our nephew with us, so it was really cool to see him get so excited about all of the sights. He is really interested in history, so I knew he would get a kick out of this place.
The fenced area to the left in this photo is part of the old rail system that they used to move the ore to and from the smelting furnace.
Fayette has 20 historic buildings that you can investigate and walk through.
This is the back side of the smelting area. You can see the two furnace stacks in the background.
This is another view of the furnace building. In the far background you can see the white house that belonged to the mining town superintendent.
Straight ahead in this photo you have the remnants of the town store. Many people avoided going to the town store. Instead, they relied on mail order catalogs to avoid the inflated prices the store charged due to them being a captive audience. It seems that things haven't really changed that much....
This photo shows the town machine shop in the foreground. Just behind that is the company office and even farther back is the old boarding house. If I remember correctly the price to board was about $.50 per night which was 10% of the workers wages back then.
This is another view of the machine shop from the side.
And a closer view of some of the abandoned equipment.
If you scroll back up to the opening photo, you will notice a bluff just beyond the bay. That is part of the old quarry from the town. You can actually walk up that bluff and it is on my bucket list, but we didn't because the ticks have been really bad across the US this year. The last thing I wanted to do was bring my nephew home with lymes disease.
Finally, this is a view of the old furnace. The building is huge and the pigeons have taken up residence in it. You can walk into the areas where they would store the iron and load it into the furnace. It is cool in there most of the time now, but you can imagine how hot it would have been to work in there every day.
There you go, a quick #wednesdaywalk through the historic town of Fayette, MI. I actually didn't get as many steps as you would have thought. It took a bit more walking at our campground for me to hit my 10k for the day.
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All pictures taken by myself or 