Alger County

Located in the north-central part of the Upper Peninsula, Alger County is a lightly populated area with breathtaking scenery and a terrain which provided the inspiration for Longfellow's "Song of Hiawatha." The Au Sable Lighthouse, now listed on the State Register, was built in 1874 to protect vessels traversing the precarious waters.

While parts of the Upper Peninsula of Michigan was settled by humans more than 10,000 years ago, the earliest evidence of mankind in the eastern U.P. dates to only about 4,000 years ago. One of the campsites of these early settlers has been found in the dunes near Grand Marais, where some tools made of copper, bone, and stone were discovered.

Most of Alger County was included in the lands taken from the Chippewa in 1836. The Chippewas retained reservations on Grand Island, as well as the Munising area until 1855.

The first European settlement on Grand Marais, one of the state's oldest place names, was in the 1860s.