Michigan’s Upper Peninsula Takes Center Stage in New Historical Novel “The Road to Winona”
Author Dr. Shirley J. Williams sets her debut novel in the real copper mining town of Winona, Michigan, weaving local history into a multigenerational family saga.
[CITY, STATE] — A small, largely forgotten copper mining town in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula is the setting and namesake of a new historical novel by Dr. Shirley J. Williams. The Road to Winona, available now on Amazon, brings the region’s mining and timber history to life through the story of a Finnish immigrant family who homesteaded land near the Winona Copper Mine in the 1890s.
Winona, located near Houghton in Michigan’s Copper Country, was once a working mining community with its own school, post office, and general store. Like many mining towns in the region, it declined sharply after the mine closed, leaving behind rock piles, building foundations, and a cemetery as some of the only visible markers of the community that once lived there. Williams, whose own family homesteaded in the area, uses the novel to document the town and its people at the height of their working life.
The book follows a family who arrives with nothing, files a 160-acre homestead claim, and builds a farm and sawmill out of the rocky, forested land surrounding the mine. Their story unfolds alongside real regional history, including the Copper Country’s mix of Finnish, Cornish, Swedish, and Italian immigrant labor, the dangerous conditions inside mines like Quincy, and the boarding houses and Finnish halls that served as the social centers of communities like Winona, Hancock, and Houghton.
“Winona isn’t on most maps anymore, and most people driving through the Upper Peninsula will never know it was there,” said Williams. “I wanted readers to understand what that land asked of the people who settled it, and what they built there before so much of it disappeared.”
Williams drew on family records, regional historical research, and her own childhood memories of visiting relatives in Winona to reconstruct the town and the surrounding Copper Country as it would have appeared across more than half a century, from the 1890s through the years following World War II.
The Road to Winona is available now in eBook format on Amazon.
About the Author
Dr. Shirley J. Peterson Williams was born in Hancock, Michigan, and spent part of her childhood on her great-grandparents’ farm in the Upper Peninsula. A retired educator who served as a teacher, department chair, dean, and provost, she now writes about the history of her family and the region that shaped them.