Garden Peninsula on March 20, 2022, cropped from R2AWF03202022280038, IRS AWiFS

The Garden Peninsula is a

peninsula A peninsula (; ) is a landform that extends from a mainland and is surrounded by water on most, but not all of its borders. A peninsula is also sometimes defined as a piece of land bordered by water on three of its sides. Peninsulas exist on a ...

of in length that extends southwestward into

Lake Michigan Lake Michigan is one of the five Great Lakes of North America. It is the second-largest of the Great Lakes by volume () and the third-largest by surface area (), after Lake Superior and Lake Huron. To the east, its basin is conjoined with that o ...

from the mainland of Michigan's

Upper Peninsula The Upper Peninsula of Michigan – also known as Upper Michigan or colloquially the U.P. – is the northern and more elevated of the two major landmasses that make up the U.S. state of Michigan; it is separated from the Lower Peninsula by ...

. The peninsula is bordered by Lake Michigan on the east, and by

Big Bay de Noc Big Bay de Noc is a bay in the Upper Peninsula of the U.S. state of Michigan. The bay, which opens into Lake Michigan's Green Bay, is enclosed by Delta County. The Garden Peninsula is on the east side of the bay and the Stonington Peninsula i ...

on the west. The base of the peninsula is served by

U.S. Highway 2 U.S. Route 2 or U.S. Highway 2 (US 2) is an east–west U.S. Highway spanning across the northern continental United States. US 2 consists of two segments connected by various roadways in southern Canada. Unlike some routes, wh ...

, and the peninsula's west shore is reached by M-183. The largest settlement on the peninsula is

Garden, Michigan :''There is also Garden City in Wayne County. '' Garden is a village in Delta County of the U.S. state of Michigan. The population was 221 at the 2010 census. The village is located within Garden Township. M-183 runs through the village, ...

. Many of the peninsula's

hardwood Hardwood is wood from dicot trees. These are usually found in broad-leaved temperate and tropical forests. In temperate and boreal latitudes they are mostly deciduous, but in tropics and subtropics mostly evergreen. Hardwood (which comes from ...

s were cut down for use in the

charcoal Charcoal is a lightweight black carbon residue produced by strongly heating wood (or other animal and plant materials) in minimal oxygen to remove all water and volatile constituents. In the traditional version of this pyrolysis process, ...

-fired iron furnaces operated by the Jackson Iron Company in 1867–1891 at what is now

Fayette State Park Fayette Historic State Park is the state park of the historic town of Fayette in the U.S. state of Michigan. It is located on the Big Bay de Noc of Lake Michigan, between Snail Shell Harbor and Sand Bay, on the southern side of the Upper Peninsu ...

, on the peninsula's western shore. With its access to Great Lakes shipping, the remaining lumber of the Garden Peninsula was largely logged by the 1890s. However, the area is still home to endemic plants and disjunct populations. After the conclusion of the

old-growth An old-growth forestalso termed primary forest, virgin forest, late seral forest, primeval forest, or first-growth forestis a forest that has attained great age without significant disturbance, and thereby exhibits unique ecological feature ...

logging era, homesteaders tried to develop an agricultural economy on the cleared land; but these efforts largely failed in the 20th century, the main exceptions being fruit such as

strawberries The garden strawberry (or simply strawberry; ''Fragaria × ananassa'') is a widely grown hybrid species of the genus '' Fragaria'', collectively known as the strawberries, which are cultivated worldwide for their fruit. The fruit is widely ap ...

. Much of the peninsula reverted to second-growth woodland within the Lake Superior State Forest.

Formation

The Garden Peninsula is part of the western sill of

limestone Limestone ( calcium carbonate ) is a type of carbonate sedimentary rock which is the main source of the material lime. It is composed mostly of the minerals calcite and aragonite, which are different crystal forms of . Limestone forms w ...

bedrock of the

Niagara Escarpment The Niagara Escarpment is a long escarpment, or cuesta, in Canada and the United States that runs predominantly east–west from New York through Ontario, Michigan, Wisconsin, and into Illinois. The escarpment is most famous as the cliff ove ...

. The other surviving portion of the sill is now Wisconsin's

Door Peninsula The Door Peninsula is a peninsula in eastern Wisconsin, separating the southern part of the Green Bay from Lake Michigan. The peninsula includes northern Kewaunee County, northeastern Brown County, and the mainland portion of Door Co ...

. Parts of the limestone sill between the Door and Garden peninsulas have been eroded away by

glacier A glacier (; ) is a persistent body of dense ice that is constantly moving under its own weight. A glacier forms where the accumulation of snow exceeds its ablation over many years, often centuries. It acquires distinguishing features, such a ...

s. An archipelago of islands south of the Garden Peninsula spans the gap between the two peninsulas, and hems in Green Bay, Lake Michigan's largest bay, to the west. The Garden Peninsula's line of limestone hills reaches as high as 165 feet (56 m) above the water at Burnt Bluff south of Fayette. The island-strewn waters around the Garden Peninsula continue to yield a harvest of freshwater

fish Fish are Aquatic animal, aquatic, craniate, gill-bearing animals that lack Limb (anatomy), limbs with Digit (anatomy), digits. Included in this definition are the living hagfish, lampreys, and Chondrichthyes, cartilaginous and bony fish as we ...

. One of the peninsula's largest bays, Gillnet Haven Bay southeast of Fayette on the peninsula's eastern shore, commemorates the

gill nets Gillnetting is a fishing method that uses gillnets: vertical panels of netting that hang from a line with regularly spaced floaters that hold the line on the surface of the water. The floats are sometimes called "corks" and the line with corks is ...

used by Lake Michigan's Native American fishermen.

References

{{Coord, 45, 42, N, 86, 38, W, display=title Peninsulas of Michigan Landforms of Delta County, Michigan Landforms of Schoolcraft County, Michigan Niagara Escarpment