Why the Upper Peninsula Belongs to Michigan and Not Wisconsin
Glance at a map, and the Upper Peninsula looks like it should belong to Wisconsin.
Yet it’s Michigan’s, and that took some serious back-and-forth in the 1830s.
Here’s the story behind one of the Midwest’s oddest-looking borders.
The Line From 1787
Congress passed the Northwest Ordinance on July 13, 1787.
It said the Northwest Territory would become at least three states and no more than five.
The same ordinance made 60,000 free inhabitants the benchmark for admitting a state, a number you’ll see again in the cards below.
For the states in the north, it pointed to “an east and west line drawn through the southerly bend or extreme of Lake Michigan.”
You can see the trouble coming, since early maps showed that line reaching Lake Erie north of the Maumee River.
Surveyors later found the southern tip of Lake Michigan sat farther south than those maps showed.
That placed the Toledo area north of the line.
Ohio and Michigan both claimed the strip around Toledo.
By 1835, the argument had become the Toledo War.
Michigan’s militia arrested some Ohio officials and captured nine surveyors.
Congress had to step in.
The June 1836 Offer
The western Upper Peninsula came into Michigan’s boundaries through an act of Congress in June 1836.
That act gave Ohio the Toledo strip and extended Michigan’s northern boundaries to include the western Upper Peninsula.
The Department of Military and Veterans Affairs puts that gain at about 9,000 square miles.
The strip Michigan gave up covered less than 500 square miles.
The land Michigan gained was many times larger than the land it gave up.
The Michigan Manual puts the Toledo strip at 400 square miles.
Michigan’s new land was timber, iron and copper country.
Michigan would be admitted as a state if it gave up its claims to the Toledo Strip.
It was a package deal.
Michigan’s Two Votes
Delegates voted on the deal twice, with opposite results.
Fifty delegates gathered in Ann Arbor in the fall of 1836.
The delegates met from September 26 to 30, and the no side won by 28 to 21.
The delegates said Congress had exceeded its authority by attaching conditions that clashed with the Northwest Ordinance.
Wisconsin Public Radio reports that Michigan at first dismissed the Upper Peninsula as little more than ice, rock and trees.
Then came a second try.
A second convention met in Ann Arbor on December 14 and 15, 1836.
Michigan became a state only after it accepted the terms.
The Michigan Manual says the delegates approved the terms immediately and unanimously, and the meeting picked up the nickname the “Frost-Bitten Convention.”
On January 26, 1837, Michigan became the 26th state.
Psst! How much do you know about the Toledo War and the border fights that followed? Flip these cards and see which claims hold up.
Wisconsin’s Eastern Line
Under the act that created Wisconsin Territory, the Upper Peninsula fell outside Wisconsin’s eastern line.
Congress approved that act on April 20, 1836, almost two months before the Michigan act.
Wisconsin Territory’s eastern line ran from the northeast corner of Illinois through the middle of Lake Michigan to Green Bay.
From there, it ran up the Menominee River, across Lake of the Desert and down the Montreal River to Lake Superior.
Michigan’s act used the same rivers for the Upper Peninsula’s western edge.
So two acts of Congress in 1836 described one border from both sides.
The two lines matched.
Congress drew Wisconsin’s line before it wrote Michigan’s.
Wisconsin Territory didn’t take effect until July 3, 1836, weeks after the Michigan act.
The Map Mistake Behind the Western Line
Congress’s 1836 boundary for the Upper Peninsula’s western edge treated the Montreal River as the outlet of Lake of the Desert.
The Supreme Court noted that the lake doesn’t drain that way.
The mistake was known by 1841, years before Wisconsin became a state.
The Montreal River Fight
Michigan and Wisconsin did argue over the Upper Peninsula’s western edge.
The Supreme Court settled it in 1926, and Wisconsin kept the strip.
The dispute turned on which branch of the Montreal River counted as the main channel.
A government surveyor named William A. Burt chose the eastern branch in 1847.
That choice reportedly placed about 360 square miles in Wisconsin, according to a 1917 article in the Wisconsin Magazine of History.
That land included the town of Hurley.
Michigan argued for the western branch in Michigan v. Wisconsin.
Michigan hadn’t objected while Wisconsin governed the area.
Waiting cost Michigan.
Posts set at half-mile intervals marked Burt’s line, and it substantially followed an earlier survey by Captain Cram.
The ruling left the border along the line those posts marked.
The Wisconsin State Cartographer’s Office says the modern boundary remains defined by those survey monuments.
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That gap shows up in many other parts of life across the two halves of the state.
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Think you could pass as a true Michigander in under a minute?
Many transplants say they still can’t pull it off, no matter how long they’ve lived in the state.
