Northport & the Tip — a stop on M-22 North.
We're near the top of the peninsula now, at Northport — a quiet harbor village founded in eighteen forty-nine, among the earliest settlements up here.
It began as a mission and trading settlement, established with the Ojibwe leader Peter Waukazoo and a missionary, at a time when this whole peninsula was Anishinaabe country and the newcomers were very much the minority. That history is not incidental up here — the Grand Traverse Band of Ottawa and Chippewa Indians is a present, sovereign nation with its community at Peshawbestown on the bay side, which we'll pass shortly.
Five miles further north, at the very tip, is Grand Traverse Lighthouse, and it has a nice piece of bureaucratic comedy attached. Congress appropriated four thousand dollars for a light here in eighteen fifty, and the tower they put up in eighteen fifty-two was so badly built and so poorly sited that they tore it down and started again six years later. The cream-brick keeper's dwelling standing there today is the replacement, and it's now a museum you can walk through. It was originally called Cat Head Lighthouse, after the point.
From Northport the road turns south and we run down the bay side — a completely different coast, sheltered and green and full of vineyards.