Awesome Ashland

Our home for the week in Ashland, WI was Kreher Park, along the banks of Lake Superior’s Chequamegon Bay.  Ashland used to be a major port due to having the world’s largest concrete Ore dock.  A hundred years ago, big freighter ships pulled alongside this massive structure and awaited a railroad train to arrive on top of the dock to dump it’s cars filled with iron ore into each of those vertical shutes which then poured into the awaiting ship to sail it to points east out of the Great Lakes.  It must have been an amazing site to see.

Today, Ashland is a quiet, mainly working-class town with lots of old buildings.  It doesn’t draw the tourists as much as Bayfield does with it’s B and B’s and more tourist shops, but I rather preferred Ashland’s low key more “home town” kind of feel.

One way the town has spruced up some of their old drab brick buildings in the downtown area is with wonderful painted murals.  There are now 19 of them throughout town, some as long as a full city block and others as small as 30 feet wide or so.

This one is a memorial to Ashland’s armed forces veterans.

Here’s one showing some of Ashland’s buildings circa 1910.

And finally, this fun little mural of some 1950s diner waitresses.  Is it me, or does the one on the left look a bit like Hillary Clinton?!!!