Iron County Heritage Trail
US Highway 2 (US 2) is a component of the United States Numbered Highway System that connects Everett, Washington, to the Upper Peninsula (UP) of the US state of Michigan, with a separate segment that runs from Rouses Point, New York, to Houlton, Maine. In Michigan, the highway runs through the UP in two segments as a part of the state trunkline highway system, entering the state at Ironwood and ending at St. Ignace; in between, US 2 briefly traverses the state of Wisconsin. As one of the major transportation arteries in the UP, US 2 is a major conduit for traffic through the state and neighboring northern Midwest states. Two sections of the roadway are included as part of the Great Lakes Circle Tours, and other segments are listed as state-designated heritage routes. There are several memorial highway designations and historic bridges along US 2 that date to the 1910s and 1920s. The highway runs through rural sections of the UP, passing through two national and two state forests in the process.
The route of what became US 2 was used as part of two Indian trails before European settlers came to the UP, and as part of the Michigan segments of the Theodore Roosevelt International Highway and the King's International Highway auto trails in the early 20th century. The state later included these trails as part of M‑12 when the first state highway trunklines were designated in 1919. Most of M‑12 was redesignated as part of US 2 when the US Highway System was created on November 11, 1926. Since the 1930s, several changes have reshaped the highway's routing through the UP. One such alteration eventually created a business loop that connected across the state line with Hurley, Wisconsin, and others pushed an originally inland routing of US 2 closer to the Lake Michigan shoreline. With the creation of the Interstate Highway System, part of US 2 was rerouted to coincide with the new Interstate 75 (I‑75), though in the 1980s, the federal highway was truncated and removed from the I‑75 freeway, resulting in today's basic form.
Read more about Iron County Heritage Trail: Route Description, Memorial Designations and Tourist Routes, Historic Bridges, Major Intersections, Business Route
Famous quotes containing the words iron, county, heritage and/or trail:
“Whether our feet are compressed in iron shoes, our faces hidden with veils and masks; whether yoked with cows to draw the plow through its furrows, or classed with idiots, lunatics and criminals in the laws and constitutions of the State, the principle is the same; for the humiliations of the spirit are as real as the visible badges of servitude.”
—Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1815–1902)
“In the county there are thirty-seven churches
and no butcher shop. This could be taken
as a matter of all form and no content.”
—Maxine Kumin (b. 1925)
“There are some things which cannot be learned quickly, and time, which is all we have, must be paid heavily for their acquiring. They are the very simplest things and because it takes a man’s life to know them the little new that each man gets from life is very costly and the only heritage he has to leave.”
—Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961)
“And Change with hurried hand has swept these scenes:
The woods have fallen, across the meadow-lot
The hunter’s trail and trap-path is forgot,
And fire has drunk the swamps of evergreens;
Yet for a moment let my fancy plant
These autumn hills again: the wild dove’s haunt,
The wild deer’s walk: in golden umbrage shut,”
—Frederick Goddard Tuckerman (1821–1873)