This Nearly Forgotten Road in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula Was Once M-6

Many Michigan drivers are today familiar with M-6 as it's a key expressway around the Grand Rapids area.

However the road number has a long, and nearly forgotten, history in Northern Michigan.

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Deep within the archives of Michigan Tech there is an image showing a road marked as M-6 that leads between the community of Eagle River and the tiny hamlet of Phoenix in the central Keweenaw Peninsula.

The highway was short, just 2 miles as the expertly researched Michigan Highways website shares:

leading from US-41 at Phoenix in Keweenaw Co to Eagle River is designated as M-6, although the 1927 Rand McNally "Auto Road Map of Michigan" labels the route as M-9—it is assumed this is an error as other, more official sources all indicate this route to be numbered M-6.

Based on the Michigan Tech archives, the road was certainly M-6.

That roadway designation left the UP about 10 years after it was assigned.

It's interesting that such a short route was once given a seemingly important number as today most single digit state routes are key roadways in the Detroit area.

And that appears to have played out as noted again by the Michigan Highways site, those low numbers are important to the Michigan Department of Transportation.

In mid-1939, the entire two-mile length of M-6 between Phoenix and Eagle River is re-designated as M-111 when all single-digit highway designations are removed and purportedly banked for future use along a proposed "superhighway" system.

The M-6 number would resurface in the Detroit area briefly in the 1970s on the expressway that is today I-696 and land in Grand Rapids in the late 1990s.

The former M-6 in the Keweenaw is still a state highway today carrying a portion of M-26.