Qualla: Neebish Island

Neebish Island: Introduction

Mon, 23 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit ISS Expedition 28 crew, Public domain. On September 5, 1899, the steamer Douglass Houghton was heading downriver through the narrow Munuscong Channel when it collided with a barge in tow and sank. The wreck plugged the only navigable passage between Lake Superior and Lake Huron for days, stranding freighters in both directions. That single accident, remembered as the Houghton Blockade, would transform Neebish Island from an obscure river island into a pivot point of Great Lakes shipping, splitting the St. Marys River traffic into two channels that freighters still follow today.

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Image: ISS Expedition 28 crew | Public domain

Neebish Island: The Leaf in the River

Mon, 23 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit ISS Expedition 28 crew, Public domain. Neebish Island sits in the St. Marys River at the easternmost reach of Michigan's Upper Peninsula, where the waters of Lake Superior funnel southward toward Lake Huron. The Ojibwe, Odawa, and Potawatomi peoples had known this stretch of river for centuries before European contact...

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Image: ISS Expedition 28 crew | Public domain

Neebish Island: Two Channels, Two Directions

Mon, 23 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Kdorse, CC BY-SA 3.0. The completion of the Soo Locks in 1855 opened Lake Superior to large commercial vessels, and the St. Marys River became one of the busiest shipping corridors on the continent. All of that traffic funneled through the twisting Munuscong Channel on Neebish's east side, where the A...

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Image: Kdorse | CC BY-SA 3.0

Neebish Island: Island Life at the Edge

Mon, 23 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Kdorse, CC BY-SA 3.0. Neebish is really two islands: Big Neebish and Little Neebish, separated by a narrow creek locals call 'the dark hole.' Among the earliest European settlers was Major William Rains, a British national who arrived on Little Neebish in 1853 after a failed colonial venture on neighb...

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Image: Kdorse | CC BY-SA 3.0

Neebish Island: A Painter's View from the Lighthouse

Mon, 23 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit ISS Expedition 28 crew, Public domain. Pat Norton was born Pat Cook on Neebish Island in 1931, one of twelve children of the United States lighthouse keeper and his wife. Growing up with lake freighters sliding past her windows, she developed an artist's eye for the interplay of water, steel, and light on the St. Mary...

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Image: ISS Expedition 28 crew | Public domain