Marquette Historic Ore Dock, Michigan

This thousand-foot long ore dock, in Marquette’s Lower Harbor, is a remnant of the days when the Upper Peninsula, including the Marquette Iron Range, was one of the largest sources of iron ore in the USA. There once were six ore docks at Marquette, a town founded in the mid 19^th century to support the mines, located 15 miles west of town. This one was built in 1931, and closed in 1971. There is one active one left, north of town. Modern ore docks like this are unusual, massive structures, with silos that line up with the openings into the hold of long lake freighters, ships built specifically to ferry ore from mining areas in the upper parts of the Great Lakes to steel mills along the southern shores of the Great Lakes.