Why no big cities on Lake Huron

Factual Questions
1

If you take a look you don’t see any cities of any real size on this lake. I think the biggest city is Bay City Michigan.

The other lakes that cities over 100,000

I mean lake Michigan has Chicago, Milwaukee, Gary, Hammond (this city once had over 100,000) and Green Bay.

Lake Superior has Thunder Bay and Duluth (this city once had over 100,000)

Lake Erie has Erie, Cleveland, Toledo

Lake Ontario has Rochester, Toronto and Hamilton

(I’m not sure if Buffalo is on a lake or a river like Detroit.)

So why no big development on Huron?

2

Lake Erie also has Buffalo, BTW.

Isn’t Detroit pretty much on the southen edge of Lake Huron? And Sault Ste. Marie on the northwestern edge…isn’t it comparable in size to Thunder Bay?

3

Detroit is considered to be on Erie. Huron just isn’t on the way to anywhere else. Look at the map and trace routes to the midwest and Great Plains from the mid-Atlantic area and you can reasons to go past the other lakes (except Superior) but not Huron. The railroads just went by the southern edge of the lakes.

Duluth grew only because of the iron ore trade and the gateway to the Dakotas and is not that big of a city these days. The last time I was in Thunder Bay, I wasn’t even sure it would qualify as a city.

4

Weather.

5

As of 2001, Thunder Bay had a population of 109,016 (with 121,986 in the “metropolitan area”).

Buffalo is on Lake Ontario. Lake Erie is the other side of the Province of Ontario.

6

No, most of Buffalo is along the Niagara River, but decidedly at the Lake Erie end. The southern parts border on Lake Erie. Ontario is the northern side of most of the Great Lakes

7

Note that there are no major US cities that grew “on” Lake Ontario. Rochester, cited above, sprouted on the falls of the Genesee, a little inland from the lake. The routing of the Erie Canal fixed its center of growth in that area. As it expanded, it grew in all directions, on the north side eventually hitting against the lake.

If the lake wasn’t there, Rochester still would have been Rochester (but with a lot less snow in winter!). The lake basically had nothing to do with Rochester’s existence. Very little shipping occurs thru Rochester via the lake.

It developed for reasons much like Syracuse, which is still further away from Lake Ontario.

So, in regards to the OP, there is really no reason for a city to develop on a navigable lake, unless some other transportation system or nearby natural resource feeds into that location.

8

Duluth isn’t as big as it was, but it still has 86,000 people and is the 3rd or 4th largest city in Minnesota.

Sault Canada is more on the St. Mary’s River than on either Superior or Huron.

St. Urho

9

As noted Duluth, MN (and Superior, WI) and Thunder Bay, ON on Lake Superior and Chicago and Milwaukee on Lake Michigan were (are) ports serving inland rail destinations. Chicago, serving everything to the South through the West, and bolstered by river/canal access to the Mississippi, is the largest. The others, serving farmland pretty much only to the West (and with no further serious water connections) are smaller.

Gary and Hammond (and East Chicago/Whiting and Burns Harbor), just to the South of Chicago provided some access to the South and Southeast, but were actually the result of a different accident of history: in the earliest days of iron mining in Michigan’s U.P., they provided a close point to process iron, where ships could make many runs per season along Lake Michigan, and coal (albeit soft coal) from southern Indiana and Illinois could be brought together fairly easily. (Initially, making a run from Escanaba to Gary was a couple day trip along Lake Michigan, while negotiating the St. Clair and Detroit Rivers added at least two days to a run to Cleveland.) Once the plants were established south of Chicago, they were maintained even after rail transportation and shipping each increased the transportation speeds.

The section of Ontario East of Lake Huron was not a significant exporter of produce (and it exported no ores) and much of what it did ship went overland to Toronto or London or Ottawa. And the limited amount of farming supplies shipped into the region followed the same paths. (Remember, Canada is still rather sparsely settled: Thunder Bay, at fewer than 150,000 people, is the single grain terminus for all of western Ontario, Manitoba, and Saskatchewan (with some input from Alberta).

The section of Michigan west of Lake Huron was, originally, an exporter of timber, floated out to the lake without need of ports, and even today is not a significant farming region. (The limestone handled by Alpena does not justify any large city.) Bay City acts as the port for Flint, Saginaw, and Midland, but only became significant after the rise of the automoblie and chemical industries, which arose too late to spur the development of many other ports besides the established Bay City.

In an alternative universe, I could see Lake Huron assuming greater importance. The earliest paths of the French traders actually ignored Lake Erie (with the horrendous portage past the Niagara Falls), coming up the Ottawa/Outaouais River from Montreal and portaging across to Lake Nipissing to Georgian Bay. If technology and history had developed differently (with, say, an Ottawa/Huron Canal preceding the development of steam and rail and the Brits holding on to Northern Michigan (and its iron and copper) after the 1790s, Lake Huron might, indeed, have developed a major city on its northeastern shore, but those are what-ifs that never happened.

10

Michigan native here- two statements need correction:
Sault Ste Marie is not on Lake Huron, it’s on the St. Mary’s River and is actually very close to the Lake Superior end of that river.

Detroit is on the Detroit River, which connects Lake St. Clair and Lake Erie.

As to why no big cities on Lake Huron, I think tomndebb came pretty close. Another factor is that the Lake Huron watershed is much smaller than that of Lake Michigan. This means that the rivers feeding Lake Huron are shorter than those that feed Lake Michigan. For example, the Grand and Muskegon Rivers are much longer than say the Au Sable and Saginaw Rivers. Consequently, in the great lumbering days, much less of the state’s timber went to Lake Huron than Lake Michigan. Thus, cities on the mouths of rivers feeding Lake Huron never had the great early peak of commerce as those on Lake Michigan.

The thumb area does posess great fertile land and is heavily farmed, and may have contributed to the growth of Bay City and Saginaw. Of course only Bay City is actually on the water.

11

An extremely minor nitpick to tomndebb’s post, having little to do with the topic at hand, but for the sake of accuracy: Churchill, Manitoba, is available only a few months a year but nonetheless was, and presumably still is, the largest grain-export port in Canada, owing to its direct sea access and rail lines connecting it to Winnipeg and the Canadian grain-producing region in the Prairie Provinces. Export through Thunder Bay serves only Great Lakes cities in both nations and absorbs some of the production when Churchill is blocked by ice.

12

[nitpick]

Don’t forget Vancouver

Grain handling storage capacities of Vancouver and Thunder Bay approach 1 billion tonnes, while Churchill is rather small at 140,000 tonnes. [/nitpick]

13

That is 1 billion tonnes each.

14

Guess I’m going to have to nitpick here.

Not exactly. Churchill is a port, but as Tom Allen points out in Rolling Home: A Cross-Canada Railroad Memoir (Viking, 2001, p. 166):

Back to the OP’s question:

There was an attempt at building an important port on Lake Huron near Parry Sound: Depot Harbour, the western terminus of the Ottawa, Arnprior, and Parry Sound railway. According to Ron Brown in Ghost Railways of Ontario, (Toronto: Polar Bear Press, n.d., p. 201):

Depot Harbour may have rivalled those places, but nonetheless, it was still not as important a port as Toronto, Chicago, or Thunder Bay. Still, it was once a port, and had a lot of potential. What happened? Brown explains:

I suppose the answer to the OP is ultimately that Lake Huron isn’t really needed, except as a through route for ships on their way to the lower Great Lakes. Railways pass it by as well–certainly had the Depot Harbour line been more economically viable, the CNR would have kept the line open. But other, more direct railways nowadays link western and eastern Canada, and an important city in the form of ports already mentioned, at least on the Canadian side of Lake Huron, isn’t really needed.

15

Thanks. Clearly I’ve been operating on misinformation based on Churchill boosters’ allegations (not that I’ve ever had anything to do with Canadian grain exports, other than watch ships laden with them go down the St. Lawrence).

16

As of 2000, Thunder Bay was still shipping approximately twice the grain that Churchill was, although the numbers were rapidly reversing, probably permanently, thanks to receding ice floes and an aggressive campaign by the U.S. Omnitrax company to get more suppliers to think North. In the last couple of years, Thunder Bay has continued to lose business to Churchill, cheaper (newly deregulated) rail service to the east, and similar rail competition directed toward the Pacific.

(There were two years in the 1990s when TB had disastrously small grain seasons, and Churchill might have matched TB in those years, but Thunder Bay’s loss of status is fairly recent.)

17

tom, can you please provide cites for your statements above. I’ve spent a great deal of time around Vancouver, Thunder Bay and communities along the “Bay Line”, the railway that services Churchill and my experience intuitively regards Churchill of little significance. My recent research doesn’t seem to allow for the possibility that Churchill could even come close to Thunder Bay. For example, Transport Canada has this to say about grain shipments from the praires for export in the 98/99 yeasr

So Churchill has only less than 5% of the total national port capacity to handle Canada’s grain and that year actually handled 2%. Thunder Bay has 44% of the national port capacity for grain handling, yet handled 26% of the nations total grain export.

Lets assume Churchill operates at full capacity

If Thunder Bay at its best can turn over it grain 8 times in an eight month season then Churchill at its best can turn over grain 3 times in a 3 month season. That means at most that Churchill can only handle 420, 000 tonnes. Canada on average exports 30 million tons of grain, which means that Churchill at most can only handle 3% of Canada’s grain. There is no way that in one or two years Thunder Bay can have fallen to handling only 6% of Canada’s grain exports. Vancouver is already taxed to the limit and I can’t see rail exports expanding significantly.
Sorry tom but I think you’re way off on this one. Regarding the success of Omnitrax, I believe it has a lot to do with non Wheat Board related commodities.

18

The city of Sarnia, ON, at the head of the St. Clair river (i.e. the south end of Lake Huron), has a population of ~88k (2001.) Across the river, Port Huron, MI has a population of ~32k. So together their population is over 120k, which is comparable to Duluth/Superior and Thunder Bay.

For comparison, here are the latest census figures (2000 for the US, 2001 for Canada) for the other cities mentioned thus far:

Duluth, MN: 86,918
Superior, WI: 27,368
Thunder Bay, ON: 121,986
Bay City, MI: 36,817

19

grienspace, it would seem that your argument is with Polycarp, who actually claimed that Churchill was the leading grain port. I only noted that Thunder Bay has been losing business and that if Churchill has surpassed TB, it is a recent phenomenon.

Different stories on the topic include this Google cached story from INFOTERRA: Canada from which I extracted my 2:1 number and this story, including a chart showing loss of business at Thunder Bay through 2000.

I will point out that measuring storage capacity of a port is meaningless if no one ships through it. In a story related to my second link, they note the large numbers of grain silos that have been destroyed in TB because they have gone unused for so long.

20

MikeS: But Port Huron isn’t a commercial port. Sarnia, though, does have ports that mostly support its petrochemical industry. I think the last true port in Port Huron was the old Peerless cement site, which is now riverside condos and the Thomas Edison Inn (he spent time working on trains there).

Both of their metropolitan areas, though, are significantly larger than, say, some of the other cities. But we don’t have populations of the other cities’ metropolitan areas, either!

Uh, and KenGr, there’s not a person in Detroit who would say they consider themselves to be on Lake Erie. It’s on the Detroit River, between Lake Erie and that muddlepuddle called Lake St. Clair.