The SIA's 26th Annual Conference drew more than 260 participants to learn about the industrial archeology of Michigan's Upper Peninsula and to explore landscapes shaped by copper and iron mining. The conference, held from May 29 to June 1 in Houghton, was hosted by the faculty and students of Michigan Technological University's Graduate Program in Industrial History and Archeology. Site visits, process tours, paper sessions, and social events were all tuned to the theme of mines, mills, and smelters.
Whether driving more than 500 miles by way of Detroit or Chicago, or flying by commuter plane over endless forests to Houghton County's airport, SIAers knew they had reached what was a remote mining frontier over a century ago, and a place that even today can be a challenging environment, especially when winter storms blow off of Lake Superior. Even before touring began, the view from the top floor of the conference hotel on the Portage Lake provided an enticing panorama of the Portage Lake Lift Bridge, the Quincy Mining Company's smelters, and the shafthouse of the Quincy Mine, high on the Mineral Range above the lake, where copper-bearing lodes outcrop along the central spine of the Keweenaw Peninsula.
Iron, not copper, however, was the theme of Thursday's full-day early-bird tour. The group traveled 90 miles southeast of Houghton to the Marquette Iron Range, discovered in 1844. The opening of the ship canal at Sault Ste. Marie in 1855 made the region more accessible, and rapid expansion began in the 1860s. The Michigan Iron Industry Museum in Negaunee provided an introduction to iron mining technology and life in the mining communities. Curator Thomas Friggens welcomed the SIA and gave a brief overview of the museum's development near the site of the Carp River Forge, where iron was first produced in the region in 1848. Tim Tumberg, who recently completed archeological field work at the forge site, led a walking tour explaining how technological and economic problems eventually led to the failure of the forge and the decision by most mine owners to ship the ore to blast furnaces in Pennsylvania and the Midwest.
Thursday afternoon, tour participants explored Marquette's waterfront and watched iron-ore loading docks in operation. Lunch was enjoyed in the shadow of the Egyptian Revival-style concrete headhouses (1919) of the Cleveland-Cliffs Shaft Mine in Ishpeming. By special arrangement, one busload toured the Tilden Taconite Mine and Mill, one of Michigan's two operating iron mines. Opened in 1973, the open-pit mine with its huge loaders and off-road dump trucks yields deposits of magnetite and hematite while the adjacent mill concentrates and pelletizes it for shipment.
For those who could not attend the full-day early bird tour, a half-day tour of wood products facilities near Houghton was offered. The tour stopped at two operating facilities: Northern Hardwoods Division of Mead Corp. and Horner Flooring Co., a manufacturer of parquet floors for basketball courts and gymnasiums. Thursday evening's opening reception at the conference hotel featured a slide-show orientation by Larry Lankton, a member of the Michigan Tech faculty and author of the conference guidebook Keweenaw Copper.
Copper was the theme of Friday's tours. At Painesdale, south of Houghton, the group visited a mining town complete with company houses, stores, churches, and schools. Community volunteers working to save the Champion #4 Shafthouse (1902) greeted the group, speaking eloquently of the structure as a memorial to the men who lived and died blasting, tramming, hoisting, and crushing the copper rock that once fed the local economy. The copper mines closed in the 1960s.
The tour continued to Redridge with the buses following the old grade of the Copper Range RR that once delivered the copper ore from the mine to the mills on Lake Superior. At the ruins of the Baltic Mill (ca. 1890) huge stamp mills once broke and abraded the copper ore; afterward, hydraulic separators, jigs, wash tables, and slime buddles separated the copper from the "poor rock." The Redridge Steel Dam (1901), which once supplied water to the mills, was constructed by the Wisconsin Bridge & Iron Company and was only the second steel dam erected in the United States. Now that the reservoir has been drained, the previous timber crib dam, constructed in 1894, can also be seen after years of submersion.
After a windshield tour of the Quincy Mine smelters and a view of the massive tailing piles that line Portage Lake, the Houghton County Historical Society opened its displays, providing a glimpse of life in the historic mining towns. The highlight of the afternoon was the Quincy Mine, operated by the Quincy Mining Company from 1846 to 1945 and now a National Historic Landmark. In order to gain entry to the mine, conference participants boarded a newly installed cog railway car. The car travels 600' down the side of the mountain, where visitors unload and then don jackets and hard hats for a tractor-pulled wagon ride that finishes the journey into the mine by way of a horizontal adit. The rail and wagon ride is exciting but still a far cry from the 9,000 ft.-long drop that miners once took from the No. 2 Shaft-Rock House. By 1918 the No. 2 shaft had followed the Pewabic Copper Load so deep below the surface that Quincy Mining purchased the world's largest steam-powered hoisting engine to raise ore and lower equipment and miners. The carefully restored Nordberg hoist remains in place as one of the world's most spectacular industrial monuments. Friday's activities ended with the traditional show-and-tell session at the conference hotel.
On Saturday, the conference reconvened on the Michigan Tech campus for paper sessions and the annual business meeting. The focus of this year's paper sessions was mining, with papers not only on Michigan mines but also those in Pennsylvania, Alabama, Nevada, Montana, and Minnesota. Presenters also offered up the usual smorgasbord of paper topics, including bridges, metalworking, iron, wood products, waterpower, and industrial landscapes. The business meeting was held over a buffet lunch at a university dining hall. After a full day of papers, the day ended with dinner at the conference hotel. The world's only Finnish reggae band provided music and dancing.
Sunday's post-conference tour continued the theme of copper with stops at the mines and mining communities on the north end of the Keweenaw Peninsula copper range. In Calumet, the group walked the site of the Calumet & Hecla mine shops and offices. The Calumet mines were the peninsula's richest, operating from the early 1870s to the 1960s. An impressive collection of brick and stone mine buildings survives in Calumet with an intact commercial district and ethnic neighborhoods founded by Finns, Italians, and eastern Europeans.
Traveling north of Calumet, the tour buses passed many of the earliest mine sites, where mass copper in fissure veins was found by prospectors in the 1840s and 1850s. The group walked down to and across the first level of the Delaware Mine, 100' below ground. The mine operated between the 1840s and the end of the 19th century but failed to produce a profit because of copper veins that promised more than they delivered. The mine has been open to the public for tours since 1977. Inside the mine, tour guides offered explanations of mining technology in clear view of the stopes and hanging walls carved by miners over a century ago.
The towns of Eagle River, Eagle Harbor, and Copper Harbor on Lake Superior's shore once served as commercial villages to the mines but now rely on tourism for their economies. The group toured the Eagle Harbor Lighthouse (1851) and the Copper Harbor Lighthouse (1849), among ten lighthouses established by the federal government in the 19th century to guide ships supplying the mines and shipping out the ore. At Fort Wilkins, the group viewed a restored fort established in 1844 as a garrison to keep the peace in the copper country. Abandoned by the late 1860s, the fort became a state park in 1923.
As the conference concluded, SIAers had experienced the best physical remains of an industrial landscape shaped by over 150 years of mineral extraction. We had gained insights into the technology of ore extraction and processing, and how working communities grew and declined alongside mines, mills, and smelters. Thanks go to conference chief organizer Pat Martin, the faculty of Michigan Tech including Terry Reynolds, Larry Lankton, Bruce Seely, David Landon, and Kim Hoagland, and all of the graduate students of the Industrial History and Archeology program for an excellent and memorable conference.
J.P.H.