The Upper Peninsula Of Michigan As The 51st State?
Here’s a bit of Michigan history you may not know – The Upper Peninsula of Michigan wanted to be the 51st state. Really. Yoopers unite!
Found this in an article by Justin Brown back in 2021:
In as early as 1858, a convention was held to combine the Upper Peninsula, several counties in northern Wisconsin, and a few stray counties in Minnesota, to be admitted into the union as the state of Superior. (The name Ontonagon was also considered, modeled after the city where the convention was held.) Several other initiatives were mounted throughout the late 1800s and 1900s as Upper Peninsula residents felt culturally and politically separated from the rest of the state.
He even figured out some demographics for The Upper Peninsula if it was a state:
If Michigan’s Upper Peninsula were its own state…
Prospective State Capital: Marquette, SP
Major Universities: Michigan Technological University, Northern Michigan University, Finlandia University
Notable Monuments/Attractions: Mackinac Bridge, Great Lakes Shipwreck Museum, Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore
Number of House Seats: Superior – 1 / Michigan – 13 (no net loss due to population)
So what does it mean to be a “Yooper”? Born or raised in the Upper Peninsula – most people say you can live their for 10 years to earn your “Yooper Stripes” (which flannel and a beard).
But is “Yooper” a real word – not until 2014. Here’s Steve Parks explaining what happened:
“A friend and I were playing Scrabble and he went to play the word ‘Yooper’ and we haggled about that and we went to the dictionary and realized that it was not in the dictionary…So from that point on, I decided to write to see if I could get it in the dictionary.”
For more than 10 years, Steve Parks wrote to Merriam-Webster under the pen name Clayton Parks. He says tried to have some fun with his work by sending the lexicographer some Yooper treats.
“I sent her Yooper pens, I sent her Yooper chocolates, I sent her a Yooper shirt. I was bombarding her with Yooper stuff…Yooper cards…anything that said Yooper on it, I mailed it to her,” says Parks.
But Steve says it wasn’t his Yooper gifts that sealed the deal, it was a crossword puzzle.
“A crossword puzzle from the Boston Globe and the word was ‘a name for a resident of the Upper Peninsula of Michigan’ and that was probably the clincher,” he adds.
