Despite status as footnote in cinema history, Upper Peninsula's Mt. Shasta Lodge remains log cabin classic

By JIM DuFRESNE
The Flint Journal
April 7, 1991

MICHIGAMME — In 1959, America watched a seductive young woman turn to a small town lawyer on the sliver screen and make an emotional plea.

“I’m lonely, I’m awfully lonely, Paul,” said the woman. “I wouldn’t have gone to that roadhouse if I wasn’t.”

The movie was “Anatomy Of A Murder,” based on the novel by John Voelker. The starlet was Lee Remick, the leading actor Jimmy Stewart and that roadhouse was Mt. Shasta Lodge, where today those traveling across the Upper Peninsula on US-41 still stop off for a beer or the Friday night fish fry.

By John Barlow Martin
Harper’s Magazine
December 1947

My mind keeps going back to our summer vacation in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan—two weeks this year, not all summer as before the war. The end of a summer is always sad, anywhere; something is dying. The end of this particular summer in this particular place was especially unhappy, for Upper Michigan is changing fast. Four years ago, in a book about Upper Michigan, Call It North Country, I wrote that the region was at least fifty years behind the times—a bypassed pioneer island in the stream of civilization, the last Midwest wilderness. The leading industries were still iron mining and logging, not tourism. People burned kerosene, not electricity. Only one highway ran through the woods. You slept in "camps," not "cottages" (a holdover term from the great white pine days of the logging camps). Well, if you want to see it this way, you had better look fast.