Michigan's oldest city grew up where ships once had to be dragged overland
Early vessels heading for Lake Superior hit a wall of rapids on the St. Marys River. Crews hauled them around on land, a job likened to moving a house that could take weeks. Sault Ste. Marie, founded as a Jesuit mission in 1668, became Michigan's oldest city beside that choke point.
The name records the obstacle. Seventeenth-century French used sault, an old spelling of saut, meaning a leap, for waterfalls and rapids, so Les Saults de Sainte Marie meant the rapids of Saint Mary's river. English keeps the French spelling without hyphens, though locals on both sides simply call the place the Soo. Missionaries Claude Dablon and Jacques Marquette set up the mission in 1668, and in 1671 a French agent staged a congress of Indigenous nations there to proclaim French claims.
For more than 140 years the settlement straddled the river as one community, first under French and then British rule, and became a busy fur-trade post. John Johnston, an Irish-born trader regarded as its first European settler in 1790, married Ozhaguscodaywayquay, daughter of the Ojibwe chief Waubojeeg, one of many alliances between traders and Ojibwe families. After the War of 1812 a boundary commission fixed the border along the river in 1817, and the United States barred Canadian traders, splitting the town into the twin cities that exist today. The US built Fort Brady, and after the Erie Canal opened in 1825, Yankee settlers swamped the older mixed culture.
Shipping around the rapids improved dramatically with the State Lock of 1855, the first American lock, since expanded into the Soo Locks linking Lake Superior with the lower Great Lakes. The downtown now sits on an island bounded by a power canal and the locks. In 1938 a bequest of $70,000 paid for a community building with an indoor rink of artificial ice, a revolutionary idea then, and the city still owns it.
Winters are serious. The Sault averages about 120 inches of snow a season, with a record 209, and a five-day storm in December 1995 dropped 62 inches as lake-effect snow buried the town. The 2020 census counted 13,337 residents, second only to Marquette in the Upper Peninsula.
Source: Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan
