Winter day in Sault Sainte Marie

Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan,photo courtesy Seeking Michigan

This photo was taken by an unknown person on an unknown winter day on Water Street in Sault Sainte Marie. Wikipedia says that Sault Ste. Marie is the county seat of Chippewa County and the second most populous city in the Upper Peninsula.

Founded as a mission in 1668 by Father Jacques Marquette, Sault Ste. Marie is the oldest European settlement in the Midwest. A fur trading settlement soon grew up at this crossroads on both banks of the river, making the area the center of the 3,000-mile fur trade route extending west from Montreal to the Sault, then to the country north of Lake Superior.

The town was split into two in 1797, when the Upper Peninsula was transferred from the province of Upper Canada to the United States.

Sault Sainte Marie is Old French for “falls of St. Mary” (Sault de Sainte Marie), a reference to the rapids in the St. Marys River, which joins Lake Superior to Lake Huron. The spelling Sault-Sainte-Marie is more usual in French, but the name is written without hyphens in English. Both cities and the vicinity as a whole are often referred to as the Sault or the Soo.

You can learn more about the Soo from the  Sault Ste. Marie Visitors Bureau and see a boatload of old photos from Sault Sainte Marie from Seeking Michigan.