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:
“As a people, we have the problem of making our forests outlast this generation, or iron outlast this century, and our coal the next; not merely as a matter of convenience or comfort, but as a matter of stern necessity.”
—William Howard Taft (1857–1930)
“I could draw Bloom County with my nose and pay my cleaning lady to write it, and I’d bet I wouldn’t lose 10% of my papers over the next twenty years. Such is the nature of comic-strips. Once established, their half-life is usually more than nuclear waste.”
—Berkeley Breathed (b. 1957)
“The heritage of the American Revolution is forgotten, and the American government, for better and for worse, has entered into the heritage of Europe as though it were its patrimony—unaware, alas, of the fact that Europe’s declining power was preceded and accompanied by political bankruptcy, the bankruptcy of the nation-state and its concept of sovereignty.”
—Hannah Arendt (1906–1975)
“We sank a foot deep in water and mud at every step, and sometimes up to our knees, and the trail was almost obliterated, being no more than that a musquash leaves in similar places, where he parts the floating sedge. In fact, it probably was a musquash trail in some places.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)