Two sites in UP classified as Historic Places

By ERIC FREEDMAN
Capital News Service
LANSING — Two Upper Peninsula sites have been added to the National Register of Historic Places– one culturally important to members of the Lac Vieux Desert Band of Lake Superior Chippewa Indians and the other related to a strike important to labor and women’s history. Rice Bay in Gogebic County is a traditional wild rice-growing area covering a quarter-mile-square on northeastern Lac Vieux Desert, a lake straddling the Michigan-Wisconsin border. And the 128-year-old Braastad-Gossard Building in downtown Ishpeming served as a department store and a factory that manufactured women’s undergarments before being renovated for an interior mall and offices. “The National Register is the official list of the nation’s historic places worthy of preservation,” according to the National Park Service, which administers the program. Lac Vieux Desert is the headwaters of the Wisconsin River, and most Michigan wild rice sites are within 10 miles of the state border.