The Lure of the North Woods: Cultivating Tourism in the Upper Midwest

In the late nineteenth century, the North Woods offered people little in the way of a pleasant escape. Rather, it was a hub of production supplying industrial America with vast quantities of lumber and mineral ore. This book tells the story of how northern Minnesota, northern Wisconsin, and Michigan’s Upper Peninsula became a tourist paradise, turning a scarred countryside into the playground we know today.

Stripped of much of its timber and ore by the early 1900s, the North Woods experience...