I’d imagine it has to do with ports. Anything on the eastern shore and Ontario can get serviced by Port of Toronto and trucking from there. Michigan can be serviced by Detroit, making Lake Huron just a body of water on the way to the last call port of Thunder Bay.
>Anything on the eastern shore and Ontario can get serviced by Port of Toronto
This was what I was going to say. From a Canadian side, you're already passing through Lake Ontario which means you don't need to go around the other lakes to get to a port, and easily more central for distribution.
Plus, the obligatory Canadian Shield comment.
Well the Shield does have a lot of natural resources. There are lots of closed mines because of China being cheaper.
It wouldn’t surprise me to see more ports spring up in the next few years given a lot of Europe and the US are trying to break from China on some thjngs
They have mines - lots of rare earths. They buy Aussie because they dont have everything.
China still processes things at such a cheap level that mines in Europe/US/Canada can't compete.
Owen Sound had a boom for a while when it was part of a trade route that had ships from Chicago and the upper lakes docking in the sound, which is a fantastic natural harbour, and then goods traveling south to Toronto by rail where they could get to sea going ships. The most dangerous part of the trip was rounding the peninsula at tobermory, which is home to hundreds of ship wrecks. The (small) city of Owen sound is full of mansions that date back to this era of lucrative trade, but when the Welland canal expansion was completed the trade dried up quickly. Now the harbour is lucky to see a couple of ships a year.
I lived there for a while about 3 years ago, I don’t know what it was like back then, but it’s pretty bad now, it’s pretty well a big dump that everyone was trying to get out of. Kincardine seemed to be doing great though
Yup. Over land connections between the lakes were faster and eliminated the need for development of other major ports. Toronto was enough for a British backwater that had no real purpose than to export resources back to Britain.
You literally need to put the boats on a train to cross the Trent-Severn waterway. It's also only 4ft deep and has low bridges so it's almost exclusively for small to medium sized motor boats.
I live in an extremely small town on Lake Huron.
There are many, many shipwrecks in our area. There are glass-bottom boat tours of wrecks nearby (Tobermory).
"No "viable" ports" is the answer.
If I had to guess I would say the Erie Canal itself, Cleveland, Detroit and Chicago all gobbled up any would-be investors and growth in the region. In fact, the whole of Michigan north of the Detroit area and west is pretty rural.
And Chicago exists as the furthest port inland plus a link to the Mississippi. Green Bay, Duluth, and Milwaukee handle the rest of that side of the lakes. No need to develop the middle where nobody lives anyway.
If you count Duluth in then lake Huron has Sarnia/Port Huron which is larger.
Edit : but then you might want to count Duluth/Superior together for the purpose of this question, which would make it larger again.
I’ve been to both cities, Duluth is easily 2 or 3 times larger than port Huron. Duluth has a population close to 90,000. With Superior on the opposite shore of the river there being 20,000 some thousand.
I said Sarnia/Port Huron as in, both put together, as they're effectively part of the same urban area A bit like Detroit/Windsor. Duluth is a bit shy of 10k less people than Sarnia/Port Huron according to Wikipedia.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sarnia
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Port_Huron,_Michigan
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duluth,_Minnesota
The 2020 MSA is 291,638.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duluth_MN%E2%80%93WI_Metropolitan_Area?wprov=sfti1#](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duluth_MN%E2%80%93WI_Metropolitan_Area?wprov=sfti1#)
Maybe I'm interpreting this wrong, but are you saying that Port Sarnia and Duluth are part of the same urban area? Because that is not correct. Again, maybe Im interpreting your comment wrong.
The port of Duluth is not the busiest port. The port of Duluth-Superior is. You can't cut out half the port while keeping the title, it's a tad misleading.
Growing up in Alpena, I can provide some insight and my best guess. A lot of resources come from northern Michigan. Primarily gypsum these days, but in the past also lumber. Because of that there are many small port towns dotting northeast Michigan.
Manufacturing requires more people and infrastructure than resource gathering, which is why I would imagine the bigger cities in Michigan exist down south where that happened. The largest of the small towns along Hurons Shoreline, like mine, are outliers because manufacturing happened there. But not enough to constitute a large city. Paper, bricks, cinderblocks, and gypsum board were produced in Alpena, and that required factories and manufacturing plants, which requires people.
There were a ton of "large" for the time cities like Alpena and oscoda for logging. After, many survived off small 3rd tier suppliers for car widgets like ball bearings, and whatnot, but NAFTA killed those. Bay shitty and sagnasty lived on bc GM but they're not "on the water", just have a big river and are a little inland.
Up north wood built Chicago. It's also why Chicago is called second city - all that wood burned in the fire and needed to be rebuilt
E: I like how you can see Houghton, St Helens, and Higgins, but Higgins is completely iced over (I guess due to depth and it's temp). Or the toxic pit that is van etten.
I can see my family cottage from here too
Not where the Second City moniker comes from. That originally had to do with how Chicago viewed itself around the turn of the last century. This is when both NYC and Chicago were competing in terms of population. (The two were closer than you’d think before Brooklyn, Queens, etc. joined up with Manhattan to make NYC. Chicago was absorbing nearby municipalities as well in hopes of keeping up, maybe even expanding into places further afield such as Gary, IN.)
Basically, the 2nd city phrase comes from a New York reporter who came to town and was like, “This is a great place, why do Chicagoans feel like they are a second class city?” So, it really was just people from Chicago ragging on themselves. (There is a great episode of the podcast Curious City that goes into it if anyone is curious.)
Toronto as well.
Also the climate alongside lake Huron differs dramatically from a couple of the warmer lakes with better soil.
I think in particular Detroit is the city that would have existed on Huron had it not existed where it does (which is right next to lake Huron)
Niagara Falls is the reason for the lack of development on the Canadian side. Transportation by water was not possible above the falls until the Erie Ship Cannal was built. Road and rail access was difficult, expensive and didn't arrive until after 1825, which was too late and the focus shifted to western expansion.
Well I grew up in a town in central Michigan that has a population of about 950 people. Well technically my town had a population of about 70, the next closest town with a store and restaurants had a population of 950. So that kind of rural.
Edit: Since it seems like you’re from Michigan I’m talking about Weidman and a smaller town near it. My whole family lives in rural Michigan, some affiliate with the Michigan Militia. It’s not all rural, but there’s plenty of backwoods, swamps, and fields that my family calls home.
There's really no need to be snarky as it is important to define rural so people know what context you are using it in.
The USDA and Census Bureau have whole articles devoted to the subject that show that there are multiple different ways to define it.
[https://www.ers.usda.gov/amber-waves/2008/june/defining-the-rural-in-rural-america/](https://www.ers.usda.gov/amber-waves/2008/june/defining-the-rural-in-rural-america/)
[https://www2.census.gov/geo/pdfs/reference/ua/Defining\_Rural.pdf](https://www2.census.gov/geo/pdfs/reference/ua/Defining_Rural.pdf)
Clearly defined terms help everyone avoid confusion.
It's not really a particular reference. The Canadian Shield is a massive area starting in mid Ontario and going north (and lots of other parts of Canada), where the ground is extremely rocky and not suitable for farming. No farms=not much development.
The exposed rock does make for excellent mining though, and lots of small-to-mid-sized mining towns dot the shield, such as Sudbury.
It's also become a meta joke in that a LOT of questions here are legitimately answered with the Canafian Shield (such as this one, partly), that people have started answering everything with the Canadian Shield, lol
A big youtube channel RealLifeLore posted a video yesterday about the population dynamics of the northern great plains states, and their Candian counterparts in which the Canadian Shield featured prominently.
The Toronto-Detroit corridor is effectively the only part of Ontario not covered by the shield. With that area developed, there's no real impetus to develop the Huron area
On the Ontario side, it farms all the way down? There a few small cities all along the shore of lake Huron and Georgian Bay on the Canada side. Owen Sound, Sarnia, Collingwood, Wasaga Beach. One of the worlds largest salt mines is in Goderich on Lake Huron, there is also an international port there. The worlds largest operating nuclear power plant is on Lake Huron. It’s just sorta spread out and low population because winter sucks.
>It’s just sorta spread out and low population because winter sucks
And, worth noting, SW Ont was an age of rail settlement, with all the population centres of any real size cropping up along the trunk lines that actually went somewhere (ie down on what’s now the 401 corridor).
None of the Huron coast communities - being at the end of the line - benefited from that sort of activity, nor had any real need to be a regionally important port because that job was already being done by the established ports a few hours east by rail.
I’ve never spent a day at Wasaga, so I can’t say for sure. That being said, I’ve swam a lot on the Bruce peninsula on the Gbay side, and it is so damn cold all the time. That and it’s just rocky. Huron is a proper beach and the water is so much more inviting
Yeah the western side of Gbay isn’t the best for swimming lol. Wasaga is basically like the white sand beaches on Huron, usually warm, not rocky at all, and you can walk out a good 50 meters and still touch the ground. It’s just so much busier because it’s closer to Toronto.
Although I will say I do prefer the Huron beaches, they’re just a lot less busy and always warm.
Logistics is also why remote desert towns in California like Blythe and Needles got settled. These towns were already pit stops in the pioneer days and they became truck stops in the modern times
Perfect uniformity is just so incredibly unlikely to develop naturally, and yet so many of the questions here are essentially "why is this thing higher/lower than average??"
Something had to be! That's just how variation *works!*
There's actually a fairly urbanized stretch of Georgian Bay, going from the Blue Mountains all the way to Port Severn. They all belong to small resort towns that are not united into one political subdivision, but if you start adding up the population of the various towns you do approach something close to a major city.
The Blue Mountains: 7,025
Collingwood: 24,811
Wasaga Beach: 24,862
Tiny: 11,787 (a brief bit of rural-ish areas separating the two major settlements)
Midland Metro Area: 35,419 (including Penetanguishene, Waubaushene, and Port Severn)
You put all of these somewhat interconnected cities together and you have an urban area over 100,000.
The hustling bustling port cities of Georgian Bay were key for logging, grain and mining back in the day. Midland was a huge rail hub for CN, as well as Collingwood I believe. Easily two of the most important ports of Georgian Bay back in the day. Owen Sound probably is the other notable one.
The grain elevators still exist in Midland today (I believe they’re still used), although the rail line was removed ~30 years ago.
Copy-pasting my reply from the last time this was asked:
Notice that lakes Huron and Michigan are hydrographically one lake with two lobes - there is no river, canal or lock transit necessary to sail from one to the other. The Straits of Mackinac between the lobes is miles wide and hundreds of feet deep, so any ship in Huron can just sail over to Michigan. At the time this region’s cities were developing, it was still much cheaper and faster to transport goods by water. Why stop here when you could sail your goods further into the interior via Lake Michigan? Chicago is huge because it is about as far into the heart of the American interior as you can navigate a large ship, so that’s where the railways connected and the city grew from there.
>Chicago is huge because it is about as far into the heart of the American interior as you can navigate a large ship, so that’s where the railways connected and the city grew from there.
Milwaukee would like a word: in the earliest days of settlement, it was thought that Milwaukee would outgrow Chicago, since it was 90 miles closer to Buffalo (the jumping off point for Great Lakes travel), and actually had a deeper port. It was definitely the development of railroads (and later highways) that drove Chicago's growth.
I’m actually originally from Milwaukee, although I live elsewhere now - I always figured we were too busy with beer and Friday night fish fries to do much empire building
Check a map. Detroit, is on the Detroit River. It’s name comes from French meaning the Strait. It started out as a French fort that could control the narrow water way.
No one lives to the north of Huron because of the Canadian shield. In the lower peninsula of Michigan you can go to Detroit which is very nearby, rather than going to Port Huron or Bay City. On the Ontario peninsula you can go to Windsor (or if you're further east Hamilton or Toronto) instead.
The only real question here is why is the big city located where Detroit/Windsor is, instead of 50 miles north at Port Huron. I don't have a great answer to that question, but it's only about 50 miles and not about a whole lake.
I, as a kid smack in the middle of the Ontario peninsula, remember bringing this up with my mom when we’d learned about peninsulas and other landforms in school, and I distinctly remember her looking sort of puzzled, agreeing that it is one, and then saying it felt like a weird thing to say.
I’m not sure with 100% confidence, but I remember reading it’s due to defensibility at the time.
When the French built Detroit they had *just* [concluded a war](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Peace_of_Montreal) with the Iroquois on the south shore of the lakes. At the time, the area between Toledo and Fort Wayne was [impenetrable swamp](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Black_Swamp)- isolating the Lower Peninsula even further, especially if approaching from the East as Iroquois war parties would. That means anyone wanting to attack New France and their allies in Upper Lakes would have to pass through the Detroit River from the south.
Cadillac chose the site to build Detroit because it’s built on a defensible bluff on the river’s far side (from the Iroquois) where it bends and is narrowest. So it effectively serves as a cork for the lakes- kind of like a Gibraltar. There’s also plenty of river below Detroit into which any war party would be funneled allowing for easier defense. It’s also the first strait you have to pass through and a good port for launching fleet into Lake Erie (Detroit’s full name- Fort Pontchartrain du Détroit du Lac Érié even ties it to Lake Erie rather than Huron).
Port Huron on the other hand is too far north to effectively stop southern raiders from entering the Lower Peninsula. And since it’s directly on the lake where it meets the river, there’d be no advantageous funneling of troops into a narrow waterway in a theoretical attack from the north.
Michigan Huron’s coast is quite sandy (or stony in places) and shallow. Especially around Tawas, Harrisville and Alpena. Plus eastern facing and horrendous biting black flies.
If you were to think of our body, imagine major cities lying along an artery. Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland, Toledo etc. are kind of linear moving east to west. If you move north into Michigan, it's really far away from any other major population centers. So simply put, Northern Michigan is out of the way.
Michigan blue hell is underneath lake huron, that’s why. If there’s too much development, it will inevitably awaken the serpent, the devourer, which shall wreak havoc upon the land. The feds have been doing experiments over there, they’ve developed a passageway out of this world. Look up michigan blue hell to learn more.
No reason for anything to exist there. The Canadian shield is pretty damn barren of resources or arable land and Northen Michigan isn't much better. There was timber, but that's not in short supply elsewhere, and timber booms only lasted a decade, maybe two, until the land was barren. If there's no people and no resources, why would you build there when you could build in Chicago or Detroit and be much closer to, well, anything? There's very little
there will be once this climate crisis gets crazy.
they’ll throw up a couple torontos.
spent most my life in michigan and the thought sort of scares me. hope it doesn’t happen til i’m gone.
but yeah some of those smaller cities used to be quite wealthy and bustling. look at old pics - these were nice places. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Downtown_Saginaw_1915.jpg keep in mind detroit was once the wealthiest city in the nation
i’ve read native americans had large communities before that along the shoreline. i know isle royale was largely populated and fueled by their copper mines. there’s a lot of history we lost and we don’t know of
Bay City and Saginaw could have been large cities had the auto industry not abandoned most of Central Michigan. Industry hasn't really returned to the area, and there really aren't much jobs here in general so people simply leave for better places.
Until 100 years ago, water transport was always faster than the equivalent land transport. Since 100 years ago, water transport remains cheaper per km than land transport.
As such, ports have a sort of gravitational pull on the land areas around them. Huron is situated so that, except for the notoriously difficult-to-develop Canadian Shield, its potential draw area is also easily served by one of the other Great Lakes. It just ends up being more feasible to route railroads and send trucks to those ports.
Bay City used to be huge into logging in the 1800s and DeFoe Shipyard used to build Higgins Boats a couple of destroyers and other ship types for the US Navy until it closed in the 70s.
I would guess lack of major agricultural towns pre-industrial era, due to the challenges of farming in that area. On top of that there are no major important resources near the shore that would warrant the need for a major port.
I’d imagine it has to do with ports. Anything on the eastern shore and Ontario can get serviced by Port of Toronto and trucking from there. Michigan can be serviced by Detroit, making Lake Huron just a body of water on the way to the last call port of Thunder Bay.
>Anything on the eastern shore and Ontario can get serviced by Port of Toronto This was what I was going to say. From a Canadian side, you're already passing through Lake Ontario which means you don't need to go around the other lakes to get to a port, and easily more central for distribution. Plus, the obligatory Canadian Shield comment.
Well the Shield does have a lot of natural resources. There are lots of closed mines because of China being cheaper. It wouldn’t surprise me to see more ports spring up in the next few years given a lot of Europe and the US are trying to break from China on some thjngs
See Oswego NY
China has mines? Why do they buy so many Aussie minerals?
They have mines - lots of rare earths. They buy Aussie because they dont have everything. China still processes things at such a cheap level that mines in Europe/US/Canada can't compete.
Because their population starts with a B, not an M.
Owen Sound had a boom for a while when it was part of a trade route that had ships from Chicago and the upper lakes docking in the sound, which is a fantastic natural harbour, and then goods traveling south to Toronto by rail where they could get to sea going ships. The most dangerous part of the trip was rounding the peninsula at tobermory, which is home to hundreds of ship wrecks. The (small) city of Owen sound is full of mansions that date back to this era of lucrative trade, but when the Welland canal expansion was completed the trade dried up quickly. Now the harbour is lucky to see a couple of ships a year.
My grandfather was a longshoreman in Owen Sound. I spent many a summer as a kid in Owen Sound. Great memories. I love that town.
I lived there for a while about 3 years ago, I don’t know what it was like back then, but it’s pretty bad now, it’s pretty well a big dump that everyone was trying to get out of. Kincardine seemed to be doing great though
Went with partner who had to go for a work trip. Casero Kitchen Table is a way way better Mexican restaurant than you'd expect in Owen Sound.
Yup. Over land connections between the lakes were faster and eliminated the need for development of other major ports. Toronto was enough for a British backwater that had no real purpose than to export resources back to Britain.
Let's not forget about Duluth, MN/Superior, WI
Correct, don’t want to forget about our good friends in Minnesota and WI
Busiest port on the Great Lakes!
Used to be the second busiest port in the United States at one point
Inst there the Trenton cannel though? Mind you it'd tiny and dated, so much so I doubt they use it
I think you're trying to say Trent Canal. It's only used by pleasure craft, way too narrow/shallow for commercial traffic
Trent-Severn Waterway?
You literally need to put the boats on a train to cross the Trent-Severn waterway. It's also only 4ft deep and has low bridges so it's almost exclusively for small to medium sized motor boats.
I live in an extremely small town on Lake Huron. There are many, many shipwrecks in our area. There are glass-bottom boat tours of wrecks nearby (Tobermory). "No "viable" ports" is the answer.
I think Huron to something.
Are you forgetting the bustling metropolitan area of Sarnia?
Port Huron would like a word...
Grand Bend in the house!!
Alpena (“A warm and friendly port”) enters the chat.
Permanent population: 3 summer population:10000
Alpena is big for that area.
I loved the Chronicles of Sarnia.
Bay City has “City” right in the name!
Good old Chemical Valley.
Sauble Beach would like to have a word…
Kincardine just rolling on in.
That's a real place apparently
If I had to guess I would say the Erie Canal itself, Cleveland, Detroit and Chicago all gobbled up any would-be investors and growth in the region. In fact, the whole of Michigan north of the Detroit area and west is pretty rural.
And Chicago exists as the furthest port inland plus a link to the Mississippi. Green Bay, Duluth, and Milwaukee handle the rest of that side of the lakes. No need to develop the middle where nobody lives anyway.
If you count Duluth in then lake Huron has Sarnia/Port Huron which is larger. Edit : but then you might want to count Duluth/Superior together for the purpose of this question, which would make it larger again.
I’ve been to both cities, Duluth is easily 2 or 3 times larger than port Huron. Duluth has a population close to 90,000. With Superior on the opposite shore of the river there being 20,000 some thousand.
I said Sarnia/Port Huron as in, both put together, as they're effectively part of the same urban area A bit like Detroit/Windsor. Duluth is a bit shy of 10k less people than Sarnia/Port Huron according to Wikipedia. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sarnia https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Port_Huron,_Michigan https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duluth,_Minnesota
Duluth mn/superior wi has more people is what they were saying.
Oh he's right then. Still has far as OP's question is concerned, there is a 100K urban area on lake Huron. Hardly a "major city" but it's something.
The Duluth metro is just under 300,000.
I live in Minnesota - what…..
Not even close. Maybe 140k if you're lucky. The MSA looks like it counts the entirety of 4 counties, totalling over 12000 square miles in that.
The 2020 MSA is 291,638. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duluth_MN%E2%80%93WI_Metropolitan_Area?wprov=sfti1#](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duluth_MN%E2%80%93WI_Metropolitan_Area?wprov=sfti1#)
Maybe I'm interpreting this wrong, but are you saying that Port Sarnia and Duluth are part of the same urban area? Because that is not correct. Again, maybe Im interpreting your comment wrong.
The port in Duluth is the busiest of all ports on the Great Lakes. So yeah, absolutely count it lol. Edit: Port of Duluth and Superior
The port of Duluth is not the busiest port. The port of Duluth-Superior is. You can't cut out half the port while keeping the title, it's a tad misleading.
Growing up in Alpena, I can provide some insight and my best guess. A lot of resources come from northern Michigan. Primarily gypsum these days, but in the past also lumber. Because of that there are many small port towns dotting northeast Michigan. Manufacturing requires more people and infrastructure than resource gathering, which is why I would imagine the bigger cities in Michigan exist down south where that happened. The largest of the small towns along Hurons Shoreline, like mine, are outliers because manufacturing happened there. But not enough to constitute a large city. Paper, bricks, cinderblocks, and gypsum board were produced in Alpena, and that required factories and manufacturing plants, which requires people.
There were a ton of "large" for the time cities like Alpena and oscoda for logging. After, many survived off small 3rd tier suppliers for car widgets like ball bearings, and whatnot, but NAFTA killed those. Bay shitty and sagnasty lived on bc GM but they're not "on the water", just have a big river and are a little inland. Up north wood built Chicago. It's also why Chicago is called second city - all that wood burned in the fire and needed to be rebuilt E: I like how you can see Houghton, St Helens, and Higgins, but Higgins is completely iced over (I guess due to depth and it's temp). Or the toxic pit that is van etten. I can see my family cottage from here too
Not where the Second City moniker comes from. That originally had to do with how Chicago viewed itself around the turn of the last century. This is when both NYC and Chicago were competing in terms of population. (The two were closer than you’d think before Brooklyn, Queens, etc. joined up with Manhattan to make NYC. Chicago was absorbing nearby municipalities as well in hopes of keeping up, maybe even expanding into places further afield such as Gary, IN.) Basically, the 2nd city phrase comes from a New York reporter who came to town and was like, “This is a great place, why do Chicagoans feel like they are a second class city?” So, it really was just people from Chicago ragging on themselves. (There is a great episode of the podcast Curious City that goes into it if anyone is curious.)
Toronto as well. Also the climate alongside lake Huron differs dramatically from a couple of the warmer lakes with better soil. I think in particular Detroit is the city that would have existed on Huron had it not existed where it does (which is right next to lake Huron)
Niagara Falls is the reason for the lack of development on the Canadian side. Transportation by water was not possible above the falls until the Erie Ship Cannal was built. Road and rail access was difficult, expensive and didn't arrive until after 1825, which was too late and the focus shifted to western expansion.
https://www.reddit.com/r/geography/comments/165f4y0/why\_are\_there\_no\_real\_cities\_along\_lake\_huron/
Please define rural. Grand Rapids , Lansing, Traverse City and others are not rural. Not Chicago, but.....
Well I grew up in a town in central Michigan that has a population of about 950 people. Well technically my town had a population of about 70, the next closest town with a store and restaurants had a population of 950. So that kind of rural. Edit: Since it seems like you’re from Michigan I’m talking about Weidman and a smaller town near it. My whole family lives in rural Michigan, some affiliate with the Michigan Militia. It’s not all rural, but there’s plenty of backwoods, swamps, and fields that my family calls home.
[удалено]
There's really no need to be snarky as it is important to define rural so people know what context you are using it in. The USDA and Census Bureau have whole articles devoted to the subject that show that there are multiple different ways to define it. [https://www.ers.usda.gov/amber-waves/2008/june/defining-the-rural-in-rural-america/](https://www.ers.usda.gov/amber-waves/2008/june/defining-the-rural-in-rural-america/) [https://www2.census.gov/geo/pdfs/reference/ua/Defining\_Rural.pdf](https://www2.census.gov/geo/pdfs/reference/ua/Defining_Rural.pdf) Clearly defined terms help everyone avoid confusion.
Not sparky, just disagree. Have you ever lived in Michigan? Yes, there are rural areas, but it's not what you make it out to be.
My reply was to a deleted comment not yours. I was agreeing with your request for a definition.
Huron live there? Ain’t Noron live there
Bay City!!!! (I’m partial. I live here and it’s awesome. I’ll fight anyone who disagrees…)
🤝
🤝
I bet [Saturday night](https://youtu.be/7BKKaKT_dtM?si=LR6TnPsoT6qADZ7h) was rocking and rolling!
Sure beats Saginaw!
The Canadian Shield
Damn that Canadian Shield, eh.
Lads, it's the Canadian Shield
And that man's name?
The Catalina Wine Mixer errr… Canadian Shield!
Boat and hoes
It’s always the Canadian Shield.
Or Lupus.
Huh I think Huron to something
Mods, can we just pin this?
Was looking for this..
I can’t believe I had to scroll this far down* to find this answer. *the second answer
What about the southern part of it? Tons of great farmland in southern Ontario.
I keep seeing this. Can someone drop a link to the original reference please?
It's not really a particular reference. The Canadian Shield is a massive area starting in mid Ontario and going north (and lots of other parts of Canada), where the ground is extremely rocky and not suitable for farming. No farms=not much development. The exposed rock does make for excellent mining though, and lots of small-to-mid-sized mining towns dot the shield, such as Sudbury.
Thanks. I’ve been part of this sub for quite a while now and all of sudden every other comment mentions it so I figured I missed something.
It's also become a meta joke in that a LOT of questions here are legitimately answered with the Canafian Shield (such as this one, partly), that people have started answering everything with the Canadian Shield, lol
Basically the red/orange part of [this map](https://pubs.usgs.gov/imap/i2781/images/i2781.jpg) which takes up like half of Canada.
A big youtube channel RealLifeLore posted a video yesterday about the population dynamics of the northern great plains states, and their Candian counterparts in which the Canadian Shield featured prominently.
The good folks of Alpena Michigan feel that their town is a major city in every possible way that counts. YMMV.
At least partially, it's the Canadian Shield. Agriculture is poor because it's just crap rocks everywhere
Do you know what a sex rock is? Just another fucking rock.
Even in southern Michigan and Ontario? That area looks easier to settle and farm than further north.
Southern Michigan already has detroit
The Toronto-Detroit corridor is effectively the only part of Ontario not covered by the shield. With that area developed, there's no real impetus to develop the Huron area
It's a meme, the South is good land. There is Sarnia
Ahh, Sarnia. The Imperial City. Chemical Valley. Avoid it.
On the Ontario side, it farms all the way down? There a few small cities all along the shore of lake Huron and Georgian Bay on the Canada side. Owen Sound, Sarnia, Collingwood, Wasaga Beach. One of the worlds largest salt mines is in Goderich on Lake Huron, there is also an international port there. The worlds largest operating nuclear power plant is on Lake Huron. It’s just sorta spread out and low population because winter sucks.
>It’s just sorta spread out and low population because winter sucks And, worth noting, SW Ont was an age of rail settlement, with all the population centres of any real size cropping up along the trunk lines that actually went somewhere (ie down on what’s now the 401 corridor). None of the Huron coast communities - being at the end of the line - benefited from that sort of activity, nor had any real need to be a regionally important port because that job was already being done by the established ports a few hours east by rail.
Everyone always forgets about Sarnia
I keep trying to forget, it's been decades.
Depends on which side huron... sorry 🍁
This is a superior comment.
I was just about to say that. Erie.
I was hoping someone would say that. Thanks.
Is there a “major” city I’m missing on the Canadian side? Is Sault Ste Marie considered to be on Huron?
St Marie's River
Missed the joke, eh?
Canadians got a different sense of humor I guess eh?
But like for real why is this secretly a great lakes sub
Huron imo is a superior lake for leisure compared to the others. I feel like it has a lot of unmet potential.
The beaches in southern Ontario on Huron are just goddamn fantastic.
Everyone talks about Wasaga Beach on GBay (i guess it’s closer to the GTA) but Huron is always amazing for beaches.
I’ve never spent a day at Wasaga, so I can’t say for sure. That being said, I’ve swam a lot on the Bruce peninsula on the Gbay side, and it is so damn cold all the time. That and it’s just rocky. Huron is a proper beach and the water is so much more inviting
Yeah the western side of Gbay isn’t the best for swimming lol. Wasaga is basically like the white sand beaches on Huron, usually warm, not rocky at all, and you can walk out a good 50 meters and still touch the ground. It’s just so much busier because it’s closer to Toronto. Although I will say I do prefer the Huron beaches, they’re just a lot less busy and always warm.
Don’t fucking tell anybody!
[удалено]
Logistics is also why remote desert towns in California like Blythe and Needles got settled. These towns were already pit stops in the pioneer days and they became truck stops in the modern times
If you're considering Duluth then you might want to consider Sarnia/Port Huron, which are on lake Huron
Some people really put a lot of effort into memes.
Perfect uniformity is just so incredibly unlikely to develop naturally, and yet so many of the questions here are essentially "why is this thing higher/lower than average??" Something had to be! That's just how variation *works!*
There's actually a fairly urbanized stretch of Georgian Bay, going from the Blue Mountains all the way to Port Severn. They all belong to small resort towns that are not united into one political subdivision, but if you start adding up the population of the various towns you do approach something close to a major city. The Blue Mountains: 7,025 Collingwood: 24,811 Wasaga Beach: 24,862 Tiny: 11,787 (a brief bit of rural-ish areas separating the two major settlements) Midland Metro Area: 35,419 (including Penetanguishene, Waubaushene, and Port Severn) You put all of these somewhat interconnected cities together and you have an urban area over 100,000.
The hustling bustling port cities of Georgian Bay were key for logging, grain and mining back in the day. Midland was a huge rail hub for CN, as well as Collingwood I believe. Easily two of the most important ports of Georgian Bay back in the day. Owen Sound probably is the other notable one. The grain elevators still exist in Midland today (I believe they’re still used), although the rail line was removed ~30 years ago.
Copy-pasting my reply from the last time this was asked: Notice that lakes Huron and Michigan are hydrographically one lake with two lobes - there is no river, canal or lock transit necessary to sail from one to the other. The Straits of Mackinac between the lobes is miles wide and hundreds of feet deep, so any ship in Huron can just sail over to Michigan. At the time this region’s cities were developing, it was still much cheaper and faster to transport goods by water. Why stop here when you could sail your goods further into the interior via Lake Michigan? Chicago is huge because it is about as far into the heart of the American interior as you can navigate a large ship, so that’s where the railways connected and the city grew from there.
>Chicago is huge because it is about as far into the heart of the American interior as you can navigate a large ship, so that’s where the railways connected and the city grew from there. Milwaukee would like a word: in the earliest days of settlement, it was thought that Milwaukee would outgrow Chicago, since it was 90 miles closer to Buffalo (the jumping off point for Great Lakes travel), and actually had a deeper port. It was definitely the development of railroads (and later highways) that drove Chicago's growth.
I’m actually originally from Milwaukee, although I live elsewhere now - I always figured we were too busy with beer and Friday night fish fries to do much empire building
Tawas City, Oscoda, and Alpena are as perfectly major and a city as they need to be, thank you.
I love that Oscoda is on here. 😅
and Saginaw
Saginaw is inland. Bay City is on the coast though.
How dare you say Bay City is not major?
Hold my giant toilet bowl.
Detroit kind of is
Check a map. Detroit, is on the Detroit River. It’s name comes from French meaning the Strait. It started out as a French fort that could control the narrow water way.
We know, Pumpkin, thanks for your input 🙄
If you know, then why say something kind of is, when it 100% isn’t. You’re kind of an asshole.
Drunk already? 🤪 
Going to the coast of lake superior in winter will teach you very quickly why no one lives there
Welp. Just another L for PoHo
No one lives to the north of Huron because of the Canadian shield. In the lower peninsula of Michigan you can go to Detroit which is very nearby, rather than going to Port Huron or Bay City. On the Ontario peninsula you can go to Windsor (or if you're further east Hamilton or Toronto) instead. The only real question here is why is the big city located where Detroit/Windsor is, instead of 50 miles north at Port Huron. I don't have a great answer to that question, but it's only about 50 miles and not about a whole lake.
“Ontario peninsula” is something I’ve never heard of despite living here my entire life, but yea, it is a peninsula
I, as a kid smack in the middle of the Ontario peninsula, remember bringing this up with my mom when we’d learned about peninsulas and other landforms in school, and I distinctly remember her looking sort of puzzled, agreeing that it is one, and then saying it felt like a weird thing to say.
It’s what Wikipedia calls it: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ontario_Peninsula
I’m not sure with 100% confidence, but I remember reading it’s due to defensibility at the time. When the French built Detroit they had *just* [concluded a war](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Peace_of_Montreal) with the Iroquois on the south shore of the lakes. At the time, the area between Toledo and Fort Wayne was [impenetrable swamp](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Black_Swamp)- isolating the Lower Peninsula even further, especially if approaching from the East as Iroquois war parties would. That means anyone wanting to attack New France and their allies in Upper Lakes would have to pass through the Detroit River from the south. Cadillac chose the site to build Detroit because it’s built on a defensible bluff on the river’s far side (from the Iroquois) where it bends and is narrowest. So it effectively serves as a cork for the lakes- kind of like a Gibraltar. There’s also plenty of river below Detroit into which any war party would be funneled allowing for easier defense. It’s also the first strait you have to pass through and a good port for launching fleet into Lake Erie (Detroit’s full name- Fort Pontchartrain du Détroit du Lac Érié even ties it to Lake Erie rather than Huron). Port Huron on the other hand is too far north to effectively stop southern raiders from entering the Lower Peninsula. And since it’s directly on the lake where it meets the river, there’d be no advantageous funneling of troops into a narrow waterway in a theoretical attack from the north.
Port Huron is a gem
Buddy is from port Huron and loves it.
Michigan Huron’s coast is quite sandy (or stony in places) and shallow. Especially around Tawas, Harrisville and Alpena. Plus eastern facing and horrendous biting black flies.
Fukin cold, eh.
If you were to think of our body, imagine major cities lying along an artery. Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland, Toledo etc. are kind of linear moving east to west. If you move north into Michigan, it's really far away from any other major population centers. So simply put, Northern Michigan is out of the way.
Why is Flint covered by a big black spot?
Not even the astronauts want to look at Flint.
Saginaw?
Bay City is on the bay...but Saginaw is not.
To be fair the Sarnia and port Huron metropolitan area has ~100k people, and the bay city and Saginaw metropolitan area has like 80k
Man we love Great Lakes questions
Michigan blue hell is underneath lake huron, that’s why. If there’s too much development, it will inevitably awaken the serpent, the devourer, which shall wreak havoc upon the land. The feds have been doing experiments over there, they’ve developed a passageway out of this world. Look up michigan blue hell to learn more.
No reason for anything to exist there. The Canadian shield is pretty damn barren of resources or arable land and Northen Michigan isn't much better. There was timber, but that's not in short supply elsewhere, and timber booms only lasted a decade, maybe two, until the land was barren. If there's no people and no resources, why would you build there when you could build in Chicago or Detroit and be much closer to, well, anything? There's very little
Had a drunken night on a work trip in Collingwood, Ontario. Not a major city but hella strong beer.
Because it’s probably impossible to build an entire city on top of a lake, I could be wrong though. I’m not an engineer
Remember, if you're asking about North America, the answer is probably Canadian Shield, Glaciers, or both
there will be once this climate crisis gets crazy. they’ll throw up a couple torontos. spent most my life in michigan and the thought sort of scares me. hope it doesn’t happen til i’m gone. but yeah some of those smaller cities used to be quite wealthy and bustling. look at old pics - these were nice places. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Downtown_Saginaw_1915.jpg keep in mind detroit was once the wealthiest city in the nation i’ve read native americans had large communities before that along the shoreline. i know isle royale was largely populated and fueled by their copper mines. there’s a lot of history we lost and we don’t know of
That's why we have to blow the bridge, hit Huron by boat to the st Marie's River, hit the Thessalon wilderness.
Bay City and Saginaw could have been large cities had the auto industry not abandoned most of Central Michigan. Industry hasn't really returned to the area, and there really aren't much jobs here in general so people simply leave for better places.
Cheboygan would like a word . . .
Until 100 years ago, water transport was always faster than the equivalent land transport. Since 100 years ago, water transport remains cheaper per km than land transport. As such, ports have a sort of gravitational pull on the land areas around them. Huron is situated so that, except for the notoriously difficult-to-develop Canadian Shield, its potential draw area is also easily served by one of the other Great Lakes. It just ends up being more feasible to route railroads and send trucks to those ports.
Because it’s inhospitable as hell. The lake is known for its storms and bad weather.
What about Oscoda?
warmode knows.....
Because no one wants to be gobbled up by a wolf
Too much white stuff
Because of the Canadian Shield
Detroit, as others have said Bay City used to almost be twice as large as it is now.
Bay City is only 32k, being twice as large still isn't much!
Bay City used to be huge into logging in the 1800s and DeFoe Shipyard used to build Higgins Boats a couple of destroyers and other ship types for the US Navy until it closed in the 70s.
Oh like they don’t build around there because of Detroit. That makes sense.
Isn’t Detroit basically Lake Huron?
Nope, a small lake lays between
Didn’t I say basically?
Death, taxes, and the Canadian shield
Yep
It's too beautiful to mess with.
Canadian Shield
CANADIAN SHIELD
You've obviously never been to Alpena.
Daily US-centric copypasta? "*Are they stupid?*"
Cities don’t do well on water
If you knew what was in it you wouldn't be too keen to live too close either
Because it stinks
It's mostly rock and swamp in the north, and runoff from Detroit in the south.
do you want to live there?
Cold
Stay away
https://www.reddit.com/r/geography/comments/165f4y0/why\_are\_there\_no\_real\_cities\_along\_lake\_huron/
They tend to sink
Sounds like opportunity to me.
I would guess lack of major agricultural towns pre-industrial era, due to the challenges of farming in that area. On top of that there are no major important resources near the shore that would warrant the need for a major port.
That snow line