Three writers at the Detroit Free Press assembled a list of six Michigan history destinations with appeal for children.  Excerpt and link:

2. Underground Railroad

What did it feel like to escape from slavery in the South and travel north to freedom? A good way to imagine the terrifying journey is to take the “Flight to Freedom” tour at First Congregational Church of Detroit. Visitors pass through “the door of no return,” symbolically exiting a slave house on Goree Island off Senegal in Africa, and land on a sugar cane plantation in Louisiana. The church’s basement has been transformed into a convincingly realistic landscape that winds through a darkened woods and past a swamp, an old campfire, falling water, a safe house, a wagon with a false bottom for hiding those on the run and more.

For more: 313-831-4080 or www.the-ugrr.org.

3. Ghostly getaway

If you get to Michigan’s Upper Peninsula this summer, check out the 19th-Century ghost town of Fayette. It’s eerie and unforgettable, an old iron-smelting village tucked away in a forest on a lonely peninsula southwest of Manistique. The people who once lived there are gone, but many of their homes and other buildings remain. In the 1870s and ’80s, this now ghost town pulsed with the sounds of immigrant families, foreign languages, trains, boats, horses and steam-powered machinery. One of Fayette’s buildings has been turned into a kids’ interactive exhibit with old toys, games, desks, book and clothing.

For more: www.michigan.gov/museum

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