Oscoda sits where the Au Sable River finally empties into Lake Huron, a small Iosco County community whose twentieth-century identity was shaped for seven decades by a sprawling military airfield that grew from a modest 1920s landing strip into a full Cold War-era Air Force base before closing for good in the early 1990s.
From Camp Skeel to Wurtsmith
What eventually became Wurtsmith Air Force Base began in 1923 as Loud-Reames Aviation Field, a soft-surface landing strip serving Army Air Corps aircraft flying out of Selfridge Field near Detroit, before being renamed Camp Skeel in 1924 to honor World War I pilot Captain Burt E. Skeel. The facility took on the name Oscoda Army Air Field in 1942 as America's entry into the Second World War dramatically expanded military aviation infrastructure across the country, and it was renamed once more in 1953, becoming Wurtsmith Air Force Base in honor of Michigan native Major General Paul Wurtsmith, who had died in a 1946 plane crash.
Across its full seventy-year history under various names, the base served primarily as a combat crew and bomber training facility, playing a role in American military operations spanning the Second World War, Vietnam, and the Persian Gulf War, before the 1991 Base Realignment and Closure process selected Wurtsmith for shutdown, with the base officially closing on June 30, 1993, a closure that reshaped Oscoda's local economy considerably after decades of dependence on the military payroll and personnel the base had brought to the area.
The River Road
Beyond its military history, Oscoda's setting at the mouth of the Au Sable River gives the town a genuinely appealing combination of river and Lake Huron beach access, with the scenic River Road tracing the Au Sable's forested banks upstream from town toward Foote Dam and beyond, a route regularly cited as one of the more beautiful drives in northern Michigan. That same river mouth setting supports a modest tourism economy built around fishing, boating, and beachgoing, giving Oscoda a present-day identity considerably quieter than its Cold War-era military heyday but genuinely pleasant on its own more understated terms.