Where Is Michigan?Whether it’s going to work, school, or the mall, cars are the main way Americans get from place to place. Over 90 percent of US households own at least one car.
When cars were first sold in the United States in the late 1890s, the average American couldn’t even dream of owning one. Cars were expensive, and only very wealthy people could afford them. They also broke down frequently and got a lot of flat tires!
Henry Ford wanted to change that. He started the Ford Motor Company in Detroit, Michigan, in 1903 with the goal of making cars more affordable for everyone.
In 1908, Ford’s company launched the Model T. It sold for about $850, about $20,000 in today’s money. That made it affordable for more people, but still out of reach for many. Ford needed to find a way to lower the price even more.
In 1913, he found the answer. He began using a moving assembly line in his factory. A moving assembly line is a moving belt that carries a product along a line while people at stations add a specific part to it, or perform a specific task on it. Instead of one car being built by one person or team, now it could be built by many people who each did one specific job on the fast-moving line. The assembly line reduced the time it took to build a car from twelve hours to a little over one and a half hours. By 1925, the price of a Model T had dropped to under $300.
Once most people could own a Model T, life changed dramatically in America. People could travel around the country. Paved roads and highways were developed. Suburbs grew outside cities. And as more auto companies sprang up in Detroit and other Michigan cities, thousands of people moved to the state to work in them. Today, Detroit remains a major center of the US auto industry.
Chapter 1Michigan’s Land and EnvironmentMichigan is in the upper Midwest region of the United States. It is the tenth-largest state by population and the eleventh-largest by area. Michigan is sometimes called the Great Lakes State because it shares borders with four of the five Great Lakes—Lake Erie (say: EAR-ee), Lake Huron (say: HYUR-on), Lake Michigan, and Lake Superior (only Lake Ontario does not border Michigan). Because of this, Michigan has the longest freshwater coastline in the world at over 3,200 miles!
Michigan is bordered by Indiana, Ohio, and Wisconsin in the south, and by the Great Lakes and the country of Canada in the east, north, and west. The name “Michigan” comes from a word from the Ojibwe (say: oh-JIB-way) Nation that loosely translates to “big lake.”
Over 40 percent of Michigan is covered in water. That makes it the state with the highest percentage of water coverage. Not all of Michigan’s water is the Great Lakes. The state also has about eleven thousand inland lakes, over three hundred waterfalls, and hundreds of rivers.
Michigan is also one of the most heavily forested states—over half of it is covered in forestland. These forests are full of trees such as spruce, pine, oak, hickory, and maple.
Michigan stands out in another way: It’s the only state that’s split into two! Both land masses are peninsulas (land that’s surrounded by water on three sides). They are called the Upper Peninsula and the Lower Peninsula. The Lower Peninsula is much larger than the Upper Peninsula.
More than 80 percent of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula is forest. Though it’s the size of Connecticut, Delaware, Massachusetts, and Rhode Island combined, only a little over three hundred thousand people live in the Upper Peninsula. That’s only 3 percent of Michigan’s total population! Upper Peninsula (U.P.) residents are sometimes called “Yoopers,” short for “U.P.ers.”
The western part of the Upper Peninsula is home to several mountain ranges, including Michigan’s highest point, the 1,979-foot Mount Arvon. The Porcupine Mountains—named by early adventurers who thought the outline of the trees resembled a porcupine’s quills—are part of one of the oldest mountain chains in the world. They’re about two billion years old! Porcupine Mountains Wilderness State Park includes some of Michigan’s most beautiful scenery, including lush forest, cascading waterfalls, Lake Superior shoreline, and miles of rivers and streams.
Michigan’s Lower Peninsula is mostly flat and shaped like a mitten. Most Michiganders (the name for people who live in Michigan) live in the Lower Peninsula, which makes up nearly two-thirds of the state’s land area. The Lower Peninsula has many beautiful beaches. These include Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore, with sand dunes as high as four hundred feet. Michigan’s most populous city, Detroit (population over six hundred thousand) is in the Lower Peninsula. So is Michigan’s capital, Lansing.
The Upper Peninsula and Lower Peninsula are connected by the Mackinac Bridge, also known as “Mighty Mac.” At five miles long, it’s one of the longest suspension bridges (bridges with a roadway supported by cables) in North America. It stretches across the Straits of Mackinac, a waterway that connects Lake Michigan on the west and Lake Huron in the east. In very strong winds, the bridge’s center section moves! When that happens, the bridge temporarily closes so no cars can go across.
Michigan has 420 named islands in the Great Lakes. Some of them are popular vacation spots. Mackinac Island, located in Lake Huron between the Upper and Lower Peninsulas, is one of Michigan’s most popular tourist attractions. There are no vehicles allowed on the island—visitors can only get to it by ferry, boat, or plane. People get around Mackinac Island by walking, biking, or riding in horse-drawn carriages. They enjoy museums and historic buildings, outdoor activities, dining, and shopping.
Isle Royale, part of a national park in Lake Superior, is only accessible by boat or seaplane. Because of its remote location, it’s one of the least visited US national parks. Visitors can go camping, hike through forests, and stroll along rugged shorelines.
The Great Lakes have been popular transportation routes for many years, and their waters are home to roughly six thousand shipwrecks. About 1,500 of them are in Michigan’s waters. At the Michigan Underwater Preserves, scuba divers can explore over two hundred of these shipwrecks, but they can’t take anything—it’s against the law.
A Floating Post OfficeThe Detroit River in Michigan is home to America’s only floating post office! The forty-five-foot J.W. Westcott II tugboat began operating as an official United States Postal Service mail boat in 1948. It delivers mail to passing ships on the river. The Westcott has the world’s first non-military floating zip code, 48222.
From early April to late December, the Westcott is open twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. It gives the thousands of sailors who spend months at a time on the river a connection to home. In addition to letters, Westcott crew members deliver everything from toiletries to food to TVs. For more than thirty years, a woman named Arlene Earl delivered flowers to captains and crew members on the ships via the Westcott. One time, the Westcott even helped to deliver a goat to a petting farm!
How does the Westcott deliver the mail? First, it drives alongside the ship at the same speed. Then, mail carriers use a system of ropes and buckets to get the mail onto the ship.Michigan’s lush forests are home to a variety of animals, such as bears, deer, rabbits, elk, and moose. The state also has more than 450 species of birds, including water birds like great blue herons and piping plovers, raptors such as ospreys and peregrine falcons, and the rare Kirtland’s warbler. Michigan reptiles include red-bellied snakes and spiny soft-shell turtles, while green frogs, bullfrogs, and marbled salamanders are some of the state’s amphibians.
Despite its nickname as the Wolverine State, very few wolverines still live in Michigan. In fact, the last wolverine sighting was in 2004! So how did the nickname “Wolverine State” come about? Experts don’t agree, but some believe it came from Michigan’s history as a fur-trading center, where fur traders from places like Canada may have sold wolverine pelts.
Michigan has a continental climate. That means the temperature changes throughout the seasons. The southern and central parts of the Lower Peninsula have hot summers and cold winters. The northern part of the Lower Peninsula and the entire Upper Peninsula have shorter summers and longer, colder winters. Michigan averages thirty to forty inches of precipitation yearly, but some parts of the Upper Peninsula and the northern Lower Peninsula get almost 160 inches of snow per year!
Copyright © 2026 by Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
