Zug Island sits at the mouth of the Rouge River, where River Rouge meets southwest Detroit. Most people only see it from the Gordie Howe Bridge approach, the Windsor riverfront or a Delray side street. The island is private industrial property. It has been closed to the public for as long as anyone alive can remember. The story of how a swamp became one of the most fenced-off pieces of land in metro Detroit starts with a furniture maker.
Zug Island started as a furniture maker’s bad land deal
Samuel Zug came to Detroit from Pennsylvania in 1836 and built a furniture business with partner Marcus Stevenson. According to the Elmwood Historic Cemetery biography, Zug was also an early abolitionist who sheltered freedom seekers on the Underground Railroad. He served on the executive committee of the Refugee Home Society, which bought land in Canada for people escaping slavery.
In 1859, the same year the furniture partnership dissolved, Zug bought 334 acres of marsh at the river mouth. The Detroit Historical Society says the land was too swampy for the home he planned. So the property sat. Then, in 1888, Zug let the River Rouge Improvement Company dig a canal through it. The cut gave ships a shortcut between the Rouge and the Detroit River. It also turned the parcel into an island. Zug died in 1889. His heirs sold the island to George Brady and Charles Noble in 1891.
Steel ran on the island for 118 years
Industry moved in fast. The Solvay Process Company used part of the island for soda ash in the 1890s. Detroit Iron and Steel began building a blast furnace in 1902, according to a Planet Detroit history published by BridgeDetroit. The M.A. Hanna Company bought the works in 1904 and added a second furnace in 1909. The plant folded into Great Lakes Steel in 1931, which later became part of National Steel. In 1922 the island was incorporated into the city of River Rouge, not Detroit. U.S. Steel picked up the plant after National Steel’s bankruptcy in 2003 and ran it as Great Lakes Works.
That era ended in 2020. In December 2019, U.S. Steel said it would indefinitely idle iron and steelmaking at Great Lakes Works. The move, as Crain’s Detroit Business reported affected up to 1,545 workers. The blast furnaces went cold in April 2020 and have not restarted. U.S. Steel itself became part of Japan’s Nippon Steel in June 2025, so the furnaces now belong to a Tokyo-based parent.
The island is not empty, however. DTE Energy’s EES Coke Battery still bakes coal into metallurgical coke in 85 ovens on the island. In February 2026, a federal judge ordered DTE and three subsidiaries to pay a $100 million Clean Air Act penalty. The case centered on sulfur dioxide emissions from the battery, according to the U.S. Department of Justice. Planet Detroit reported that DTE appealed in March 2026 and warned that required pollution controls could make the plant economically unviable.
The Windsor Hum and the Zug Island furnaces
Across the river, Zug Island has a second reputation. Starting in 2011, Windsor residents complained of a low rumble that rattled windows and kept people awake. Canada’s federal government funded a study, and in 2014 Global Affairs Canada published the results. The University of Windsor team, led by engineering professor Colin Novak, concluded the likely source was the blast furnace operations on Zug Island. A second team from Western University could not confirm that. Neither team was allowed onto the island to test.
Then the furnaces shut down. Novak told WCMU and NPR in August 2020 that complaints stopped after U.S. Steel idled the plant that April. He considered the mystery solved at “ninety-nine percent.” Nobody on the American side ever formally confirmed the link.
There is no public access to Zug Island. The best legal views are from the Gordie Howe Bridge path, the Windsor riverfront trail near Brighton Beach, and the foot of West Jefferson Avenue in River Rouge.