Sault Ste. Marie — pronounced 'Soo Saint Marie' and almost universally shortened to just 'the Soo' — has a claim few American cities can make: it is older than Boston. French missionaries and fur traders established a settlement here in 1668, drawn by the St. Marys River rapids that separate Lake Superior from Lake Huron. Those same rapids, tamed centuries later into a set of engineering marvels, remain the reason the city exists on the map at all.
The Soo Locks
Lake Superior sits roughly twenty-one feet higher than Lake Huron, a difference that would make the St. Marys River an impassable set of rapids for cargo ships if not for the Soo Locks, a set of engineered chambers that raise and lower thousand-foot freighters like elevators. The locks handle more cargo tonnage annually than the Panama Canal, ferrying iron ore, grain, and coal between the upper and lower Great Lakes. A public viewing platform lets visitors watch the process at close range, and the adjacent Soo Locks Visitor Center explains the hydraulics in more detail than most vacationers expect to absorb, and usually enjoy anyway.
Boat tours that actually pass through the lock chambers alongside the freighters offer the more visceral version of the same lesson, rising and falling with the water level in real time.
A Border Town With Two Histories
Sault Ste. Marie has a twin across the International Bridge in Ontario, and the two cities have shared this stretch of river since before either nation existed in its current form. The Museum Ship Valley Camp, a retired 550-foot freighter permanently docked as a maritime museum, houses artifacts recovered from the 1975 wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald — the same disaster memorialized in Gordon Lightfoot's ballad — including two battered lifeboats that remain the exhibit's somber centerpiece.
Tribal History and Modern Life
The Sault Tribe of Chippewa Indians, one of the largest federally recognized tribes east of the Mississippi, maintains its headquarters here, and the tribe's economic and cultural presence — from casino resorts to language-revitalization programs — shapes the region as much as the shipping industry does. Between the locks, the lore, and the sheer novelty of watching a freighter longer than three football fields squeeze through a lock chamber with feet to spare, the Soo rewards visitors who treat it as a destination rather than a highway waypoint on the way to Canada.