The story goes that if you walked up to the railroad agent and asked for a ticket to hell, he’d hand you one to Seney.

Drive through Seney today and that sounds almost ridiculous.

It’s a quiet crossroads along M-28. But in the late nineteenth century, trains were pouring lumberjacks, supplies, money, and whiskey into a town built in the middle of wet Upper Peninsula forest. Hotels filled. Saloons multiplied. Men came out of isolated logging camps with months of wages in their pockets, and an entire economy was waiting to help them spend it.

In this episode, we follow the people behind that reputation.

There’s Phil Grondin, who arrived as a logging-camp cook and watched a muddy railroad stop grow into a boomtown.

There’s Dr. Frank Bohn, who came to Seney at only twenty-four years old and spent his first Christmas treating men injured in fights.

And there’s the feud between Dan Dunn and the Harcourt family.

Two shootings. Two dead men. A manslaughter conviction. Years in the Marquette prison. And eventually, a state review that raised serious questions about whether the second killing had been justified.

Then there’s Ram’s Pasture.

Shanghaied workers. A secret stockade. Armed guards. Mastiffs supposedly trained to hunt down anyone who escaped.

It’s a great story.

But is it true?

We’ll follow that legend, meet some of Seney’s stranger characters, including the man remembered as the Ogre of Seney, and look at how newspapers helped turn a rough lumber town into something almost mythological.

And decades later, a twenty-year-old Ernest Hemingway would step off the train, find the legendary town mostly gone, and turn what remained into one of the most famous landscapes in American literature.

Seney is a story about logging, violence, survival, folklore, and what happens when a town’s reputation becomes louder than the people who actually lived there.

Want to know more?

Explore the historical records, newspaper reports, archival collections, additional reading, and some of the evidence behind this episode here:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1UiM5giLE9gGpdPuMw07CS5zkL63zt_qK/view?usp=sharing

Have a story, correction, family connection, photograph, or piece of UP history I should investigate?

Email me at [email protected]

Want to support the show?
Explorin’ Da UP, Eh! is independently researched and produced. If you’d like to help cover gas, research materials, site admission, and other costs that go into exploring the UP and telling these stories, you can leave a completely optional tip here: 💲venmo💲

A wrong turn can lead to a good story. Sometimes, so can a U-turn.

On the way home from the Porcupine Mountains, a small sign outside Rockland caught my attention: Irish Hollow Cemetery. I turned down the dirt road expecting a quick stop. Instead, I found gravestones dating back to the earliest days of the western UP copper boom and evidence of a community I never knew existed.

In this episode, we follow those stones into the world that once surrounded them: Irish copper miners crossing an ocean for work, a booming mining settlement that has nearly disappeared into the woods, a long-lost Catholic church, families facing deadly nineteenth-century epidemics, and a massive piece of native copper that took miners more than a year to cut apart.

And then there's the riot.

An axe. A dead miner. A burning saloon. Men reportedly leaping from the windows and roof. Hundreds of angry Irish miners supposedly preparing to march through the wilderness for revenge.

It's a great story.

But is it true?

Irish Hollow is a story about immigration, mining, disease, folklore, and how an entire community can almost disappear while the people who lived there remain, quite literally, carved in stone.

Want to know more?

Explore the historical records, additional reading, and some of the evidence behind this episode here:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Q7GplsAxRoEYysKg_iogvbjvlJzObHNx/view?usp=drive_link

Have a story, correction, family connection, or piece of UP history I should investigate?

Email me at [email protected]

Want to support the show?
Explorin’ Da UP, Eh! is independently researched and produced. If you’d like to help cover gas, research materials, site admission, and other costs that go into exploring the UP and telling these stories, you can leave a completely optional tip here: 💲Venmo💲

It's easy to look at Seney National Wildlife Refuge and assume it has always been this way.

Quiet pools. Trumpeter swans. Loons calling across the water. Moose somewhere out in the marsh if you’re lucky enough to spot one.

But a little over a century ago, people were trying to make much of this place into farmland.

They dug enormous drainage ditches through the wetlands, sold pieces of the swamp to hopeful settlers, and tried to force an Upper Peninsula landscape into becoming something it simply wasn’t very good at being.

It didn’t work.

In this episode, we follow Seney from one of the great wetlands of the eastern Upper Peninsula, through logging, drainage schemes, failed farms, fire, and eventually one of the largest wildlife restoration projects in Michigan.

We’ll meet the Civilian Conservation Corps crews who built the refuge’s famous system of pools and dikes, learn why those pools are more artificial than they look, and meet Betty Losey, a young biologist who spent years studying Seney’s trumpeter swans and became one of the early women doing field research in American wildlife biology.

And we’ll look at something even stranger.

More than eighty years after people tried to drain Seney’s wetlands, refuge scientists are still working to undo some of those changes.

Sometimes restoring a place doesn’t mean building something new.

Sometimes it means figuring out how to let the water come back.

Want to know more?

Explore the historical records, maps, refuge documents, additional reading, and some of the evidence behind this episode here:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Q7GplsAxRoEYysKg_iogvbjvlJzObHNx/view?usp=sharing

Have a story, correction, family connection, photograph, or piece of UP history I should investigate?

Email me at [email protected]

Want to support the show?
Explorin’ Da UP, Eh! is independently researched and produced. If you’d like to help cover gas, research materials, site admission, and other costs that go into exploring the UP and telling these stories, you can leave a completely optional tip here: 💲Venmo 💲

Welcome to Explorin’ Da UP, Eh!, a podcast about the true stories, forgotten history, natural wonders, and local legends hiding throughout Michigan’s Upper Peninsula.

In this short introduction, your host Jess explains what inspired the podcast, introduces the Jeep that will carry us along the way, and shares what listeners can expect from future episodes. This is not your typical travel guide. We are skipping the campground reviews and chasing the stories that make the UP feel alive.

Hop in, buckle up, and let’s go explorin’ 🥾🌲

Want to support the show?

Explorin’ Da UP, Eh! is independently researched and produced. If you’d like to help cover gas, research materials, site admission, and other costs that go into exploring the UP and telling these stories, you can leave a completely optional tip here: venmo account

Listening, sharing the show, and sending in stories or corrections is more than enough support, too!