Harlow Farms First Homestead
Marquette, Marquette County, Michigan
Marker Inscription
Harlow Farms First Homestead The dry stacked stone basement foundation before you is all that remains of the Amos and Olive Harlow homestead here at Harlow Farms. The Harlows were one of the earliest pioneering families in Marquette, arriving by steamship in 1849. Amos built a sawmill and this small house here in the late 1850's. The picture was taken of the homestead in the 1870's looking north from across the creek behind you. The home was two stories with the first room for living and cooking and the second story for sleeping. The family named the farm "Eureka" because he discovered a bti of iron ore nearby. They raised vegetables and fruits at this farm and sold much of their produce to miners in the area. They all lived togethere here for the first few years, then Amos and Olive and their family built the grand home in town that still stands on south Fourth Street. Olives mother, Martha Bacon stayed at the farm and lived here for the next seventeen years. Amos and Olive built a fine home for Martha next door to theirs and finally got her to move to town in 1874, and then she died the very next day! The farm was worked until the late 1800's. The forest eventually closed in, leaving only remnants of the stone piles along fences, a few apple trees that are still growing up on the hill, and this old foundation. Courtesy of: Harbour View Development Corp. Developers of Harlow Farms
Erected by Harbour View Development Corp. Developers of Harlow Farms
The Story
Amos and Olive Harlow were among Marquette's founding pioneers, arriving by steamship on Lake Superior in 1849 as Michigan's Upper Peninsula iron country opened up. On this farm, which they named Eureka after Amos found iron ore nearby, they built a sawmill and raised produce to sell to the region's miners. Only this dry-stacked stone foundation, a few apple trees, and stone fence lines remain.
Why it matters
The homestead marks the frontier settlement of the Lake Superior iron ranges, an industry that helped build industrial America.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
In 1849, the shores of Lake Superior were a raw frontier. Michigan's Upper Peninsula was thickly forested, thinly settled, and only beginning to reveal the mineral wealth that would define it. Word of iron in the region had begun to spread, and a trickle of hardy families set out for a coast reachable in that era mainly by boat, arriving on steamships that nosed into rough new landings along the great lake.
This was the classic pattern of American westward expansion, pushed into a northern key. Where the fur trade and the timber stands gave way to ore, settlement followed opportunity into difficult country. The people who came early faced short growing seasons, long winters, and the labor of building everything — homes, mills, roads — essentially from scratch.
Into that setting came Amos and Olive Harlow, among the earliest pioneering families of Marquette, stepping off a steamship in 1849 at the very start of the district's story. The homestead remembered here belongs to those founding years, before the town that would rise nearby had taken anything like its later shape.
People & events
The Harlows did what frontier founders had to do: they built the machinery of settlement. Amos raised a sawmill — a crucial thing in a land of timber, since sawn lumber was the raw material of every house, dock, and mine building to come. In the late 1850s he put up the small two-story house whose dry-stacked stone foundation is all that survives before you today, with living and cooking below and sleeping quarters above.
They named the farm Eureka, the marker tells us, after Amos found a bit of iron ore nearby — a fitting name in a district whose whole future lay in that ore. But the family made their living close to the ground, raising vegetables and fruit and selling much of the produce to the miners working the area. It's a telling detail: even in mining country, someone had to feed the miners, and a farm could be as vital as a mine.
The homestead also holds a smaller, human story. Olive's mother, Martha Bacon, stayed on at the farm for years after the family built a grander home in town, and the Harlows put up a fine house for her next door before finally coaxing her to move into town in 1874 — where, poignantly, the record here says she died the very next day. It is the kind of bittersweet family detail that makes a foundation of piled stone feel suddenly inhabited.
Its place in the American story
The Lake Superior iron country the Harlows helped settle became one of the engines of industrial America. The ore drawn from these northern ranges fed the furnaces that made the rails, machines, and structures of a fast-industrializing nation. A homestead at the frontier's edge in 1849 sits at the very beginning of that long arc.
The farm also captures a truth often lost in the romance of mining booms: extraction depends on a whole supporting world. Sawmills to build with, farms to eat from, and families willing to stake themselves in hard country were as essential as the miners underground. The Harlows supplied two of those foundations at once.
And the marker records the quiet ending common to so many frontier enterprises. The farm was worked until late in the nineteenth century, then let go; the forest closed back in, leaving stone piles along old fence lines, a few stubborn apple trees, and this foundation. It is a small monument to the settlement generation whose labor made the industrial age possible, and who then, often, faded from the ground they broke.
If you visit
Come ready to read a landscape rather than a building, because the building is long gone. The dry-stacked stone foundation in front of you is the whole of the house now, and there's a real pleasure in picturing the modest two-story home that once rose from it, and the creek behind you that an 1870s photograph looked across.
Look for the living clues the marker points out. A few apple trees still grow up on the hill — descendants of an orchard planted by a settler family — and stone piles trace where old fences once ran. These are the fingerprints of a working farm slowly reclaimed by the northern woods, and spotting them turns a quiet clearing into a story.
It makes a rewarding stop on any trip through the Upper Peninsula's iron and lake country. Give yourself a few unhurried minutes to feel how remote this coast once was, and how much grit it took to arrive here by steamship and simply stay.
Written by AI to add context, grounded in the marker’s inscription and the historical record. The inscription above is the original, unaltered text.
Own a business near here? Add it to the map.
Related people
- · Amos Harlow
- · Olive Harlow
- · Martha Bacon
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Site of Barnes-Hecker Mine Disaster
Ely Township, MI
On November 3, 1926, the Barnes-Hecker Mine on Michigan's Marquette Iron Range collapsed and flooded in minutes, killing 51 men digging the red iron ore deep underground — the worst mining disaster in Michigan history. Only a handful of bodies were recovered; 41 of the dead remain entombed in the earth where they worked.
Hardies Sesquicentennial Farm (2020)
Belknap Township, MI
Recognized under Michigan's Centennial Farm program, the Hardie family farm has been worked by the same family since 1869 — more than 150 years. The designation, awarded by the Historical Society of Michigan, honors farms held continuously by one family for over a century, a testament to the agricultural roots that settlers put down across the Great Lakes country after the Civil War.
Michigan College of Mines Founded 1885
Houghton, MI
In 1885 the state of Michigan founded a mining school in Houghton, at the heart of the Keweenaw copper country that was then America's first great metal-mining region. As the Michigan College of Mines, the institution earned worldwide renown for its teaching and research in mining, metallurgy, and geology, training engineers who fanned out across the globe. It grew directly from the copper boom that made the Upper Peninsula an industrial frontier.
The Daniel Carter Family
Alpena, MI
In 1856, Daniel Carter came north to Michigan's Thunder Bay country in search of pine — the towering white pine that would fuel a lumbering boom across the state. He brought his wife Sarah and daughter Mary to the little settlement of Fremont, today's Alpena, and the family is remembered as its first permanent settlers. Their arrival marks the beginning of a community carved out of the northern forest.