• Wednesday-What'sUP December 6 - 10:01 am

While on the way to Marquette on Sunday, we encountered varying degrees of fog, which made for some interesting scenes along the journey. This lake was one of them, with some ice floes breaking up the reflection of the trees along the shoreline. That's Lake Plumbago, which was a new one to me...the name, not the lake. I guess I never really knew its name, so I was surprised when I saw the sign designating it as such. Same for the little park alongside the lake, shown in the second photo. That was a new sign to me, there, too, naming it as Preacher Park. We've stopped there, across the road from the Ford Forestry Center in Alberta, a few times before and hadn't known the names, so it was nice to learn something new in my travels that day.

The rest of our drive to Marquette looked pretty much like the last photo here today. Low visibility, but not as bad as it could have been.

Very nice pictures. I especially like the foggy one. We had that on Sunday and it delayed our shopping trip for hours. No way we were gonna drive in peasoup. But it sure does make for a pretty picture!

Interesting...I passed by there many a time, but never stopped. Guess I should start smelling the roses :-)

Very pretty cold pictures! Fog is not a good thing to try and drive in. Spent about an hour in a rest area in the LP one time waiting for it to 'burn off'.

I agree with you, Mary! The first thing I said when I saw the Ford sign and completely recognized it was, "So that's the name of it!" lol Guess I should also do what Alex suggests and start smelling the roses!

I bet this is a pretty place to be in warm weather.

I wonder when it was named Lake Plumbago? I remember fishing for Brook Trout with my dad there back in the late 1970s, and it was simply called Alberta Pond.

I just looked up the word Plumbago and found this on wikipedia:

Plumbago is a genus of 10-20 species of flowering plants in the family Plumbaginaceae, native to warm temperate to tropical regions of the world.

How did a northern lake get named for a tropical flower?

I bet many of you didn’t realize that the small stretch of US 41 between Alberta and Plumbago Lake is a dam. Below are a couple of paragraphs from “Henry Ford, Life and Logging” by Brian Cleven that explains why the man-made lake is even there. Click on the link below to read the full article.

http://www.superiorreading.com/pdf/ford.peq.pdf

“Henry Ford is the sole reason for Alberta’s existence. Driving south on US 41 south of L’Anse in 1935, Henry Ford and his party stopped on the banks of Plumbago Creek. Gazing about him, he determined there should be a plant there. Within a couple of days, a bulldozer began the work of clearing the new mill and town site.

Ford picked the site feeling it would be a good location for a lake. It proved to be an excellent choice for several reasons. The twenty-acre lake, created by damming the Plumbago Creek, provided a water reservoir for use in the sawmill’s boiler. It was in a vast expanse of hardwood forest and close to Ford’s operations in L’Anse and Pequaming.”

Thanks, Clyde. I didn't know that, and this despite the fact that I
had relatives working in Pequaming and a father who grew up in
L'Anse.