History Commons^™

A Birthday For The Upper Peninsula, Mark Ruge

Upper Country: A Journal of the Lake Superior Region

Everyone and everything should have its own birthday, particularly a special place like Michigan's Upper Peninsula, which does not. In this article, the author traces the political machinations of Michigan and the Upper Peninsula with a goal of finding the most appropriate birthday. He and the attendees at the Sonderegger Symposium XVI, sponsored by the Center for U.P. Studies, at Northern Michigan University, settle on December 14, 1836, the date when the final condition was met to establish the boundaries of Michigan as a state—boundaries that for the first time included the entirety of the Upper Peninsula as we know …