Full script: the history of Negaunee, Michigan
Negaunee sits on the shore of Teal Lake, in Michigan's Upper Peninsula. Its name comes from an Ojibwe word meaning foremost, or leading, the closest translation anyone could find for pioneer.
The town was built on iron. The Jackson Mine opened in 1845, and the first iron forge in the whole Lake Superior basin was set up here.
Miners dug so much ore out from under the town that, in the early twentieth century, roughly half the city was abandoned. The ground was at risk of caving in.
Then, on January 16, 1952, something happened here that has never happened anywhere smaller. Negaunee hosted a National Basketball Association game.
The Milwaukee Hawks played the Baltimore Bullets. Milwaukee won, seventy-seven to seventy-one. Baltimore's Don Barksdale led all scorers with twenty-four points.
More than seventy years later, Negaunee is still the smallest city ever to host a game in any of the four major North American professional sports.
It has other claims, too. The only full-length natural-track luge course in the United States is here, and so is a ski jump called Suicide Hill.
Not bad for a mining town that once had to give up half its streets to the ground beneath them.
