Local lore in Superior, Wisconsin, Wisconsin

• The SS Meteor at Barker's Island is the last whaleback freighter on earth. There were around 44 built, almost all of them at the shipyard here, and Superior kept the final one.
• Superior expected to win. The city was platted for a population several times what it ever reached, which is why the street grid runs so far and the lots are so wide. Duluth got the railroad; Superior got the room.
• Wisconsin Point and Minnesota Point together form one of the longest freshwater sandbars in the world, split by the Superior Entry. The Point is also a place of deep significance to the Fond du Lac Band, whose ancestral burial ground was relocated from it in the early twentieth century, a history the city and the Band have worked on together in recent years.
• Barker's Island is not natural. It is harbor dredge spoil from the 1890s that the city later turned into its beach, marina, and museum.
• Martin Pattison bought the Black River land to keep a power company from damming Big Manitou Falls, then gave it to the state. Wisconsin's highest waterfall exists because a Superior lumberman changed his mind about what land was for.
• Earth Rider brews in Superior and put its taproom in the Cedar Lounge, a bar that had been open for more than a century before it became a music venue.

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