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Mackinaw City, MI → Calumet, MI → Mackinaw City, MI 557.0 mi (896.4 km) |
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Sounds like a conspiracy, everyone!
This morning, I’m up early and northbound to the Keweenaw Peninsula, which, it turns out, is not pronounced “kiwi-nah” but “key-wah-nah!” When I heard it pronounced for the first time by a park ranger, I thought for sure it was conspiracy group of years past, Q-Anon, but it’s actually an Ojibwa word meaning “crossing place!”
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Regardless of how I stumbled over its pronunciation, the towns along the Keweenaw Peninsula make up a patchwork of historic sites collectively known as Keweenaw National Historical Park, which tells the story of the nation’s first copper boom! Right at the entrance in the city of Calumet, I was greeted by a monumental boulder of copper, 9,392 pounds of it! Called “float copper,” these hunks of metal were dislodged from their veins by glacial movement, smoothed, rounded, and then buried. This one was dug up on 1970 after roughly 9,000 years oxidizing underground!
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I wandered from the entrance into Calumet, where I was greeted by the statue and home of Alexander Agassiz, a scientist formerly of the Harvard Museum of Comparative Zoology, turned investor and later president of the Calumet and Hecla Mining Company! His management style kept the company competitive against the rise of Arizona and Montana mining enterprises, but he was also notorious for ethnically sorting, spying on, and refusing to negotiate with mine workers! Nonetheless, he still made sure the workers living in the company town were provided housing, schools, a hospital, and a public library!
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One such library, the Calumet and Hecla Mining Company Public Library, provided both scholarly resources and public baths for townsfolk from 1897 until 1944! Today, it serves as the Keweenaw History Center, which houses artifacts and other historical resources that folks can research by appointment!
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Likewise, Calumet was filled with churches to cater to townsfolk’s spiritual needs, many of which have also been repurposed into Keweenaw Heritage Sites, privately owned partners of the historical park. For instance, this big green church from 1893 is now the Calumet Art Center, while the St. Anne’s Church, opened in 1901 for French-Canadian Catholics, is now the Keweenaw Heritage Center, a museum, venue, and HQ for historic preservation across town!
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This church just down the road catered to a different kind of Catholic, those from Slovenia, Croatia, Austria, and Italy! In fact, there were six different Catholic churches serving Calumet at its height! This one was originally named St. Joseph’s Church, which burned in 1902 and was rebuilt from fireproof sandstone over five years from 1903 to 1908!
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Today, Calumet was a little sleepy, possibly because the national park sites were technically closed for the season, just like Father Marquette National Memorial, but 5th Street is still a hub of commerce, long after the watchmakers, tin smiths, and shopkeepers vacated their original buildings to make room for cafes and gift shops!
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The gray skies made things a little somber, especially as I made my way to one of the park’s most recognizable memorials: site of the Italian Hall tragedy! Three years after Mr. Agassiz died, the workers of Calumet were able to organize and strike for better wages and working conditions. On Christmas Eve, 1913, hundreds of folks gathered on the second floor of Italian Hall for a party, and someone yelled “Fire!” In the ensuing stampede, 73 folks died, over half of them children, and while no one was officially prosecuted, it’s suspected that company officials had barred the doors and facilitated the stampede!
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Around the corner from the memorial, I spotted the Calumet Theatre, built off the town’s treasury surplus and opened March 20, 1900! Tons of big names performed here, like Helena Modjeska, John Philip Sousa, and Douglas Fairbanks, Sr.! It was the center of entertainment for a town of 4,000 in a greater community of 30,000! Though it spent a while as a movie theater after from the Great Depression into the late 1950s, today, it’s run by the Calumet Theatre Company, making it the only building in Keweenaw National Historical Park that still serves its original function!
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Literally across the street stood another nationally registered building, the Red Jacket fire station, built in 1898 and now home to the Copper Country Firefighters History Museum! Designed by architect C. K. Shand in the Richardsonian Romanesque style, it served to protect the townsfolk of Calumet (originally “Red Jacket”) from 1899 all the way until 1964, when the fire department moved to town hall!
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Speaking of fires and Red Jackets, a series of underground blazes in the Calumet Conglomerate Lode inspired the Calumet and Hecla Mining Company to dig a deeper shaft. Starting in 1889, the Red Jacket Mine shaft broke the world record at 4,900 feet, but kept going to a final depth of 9,600 feet!
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Today, though, there isn’t much to see of this literally groundbreaking mine shaft, which closed in 1939 and was razed during World War II. Today, only one sandstone warehouse remains of what was a large processing plant, the only visual reminder of the Red Jacket Mine!
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Then I realized I didn’t just want to stand outside a mine and look in; I wanted to go deeper! Lucky for me, between Calumet and Houghton, the historic Quincy Mine offered tours of its deep tunnels! It was the perfect time to go underground, because the storm that had been threatening all morning was finally getting ready to burst overhead!
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The Quincy Mine, named after Quincy, Massachusetts, was super long-lived, digging for copper from 1846 until 1945! The key to its success was focusing on lower-grade amygdaloid ore, which could be dug up and sent elsewhere for processing, instead of taking the time to painstakingly extract pure copper from fissures. It was the first mine on the Keweenaw Peninsula to make this move!
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Another key to the Quincy Mine’s success was its investment in workers. To bring in miners who would stick around and not be poached by competitors, the company’s executives wanted full-on houses built where miner families could put down roots! That was a big upgrade from the mine’s early days when the workers all lived in tents!
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To get those miners into the mines and the ore out of them required the world’s largest steam-driven mine hoist, mounted on the world’s largest concrete slab! It was built in 1918 and housed inside Quincy Number 2 Hoist House! Capable of lifting 10 tons of ore at a time, it was also the main way for miners to get out of the mines when their days were done, tucked onto the conveyor belt and whizzed up the narrow shaft at 36.4 miles per hour! It was just as dangerous leaving work as it was to do the work!
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I joined a 3:00 mine tour, which was luckily not going to be moved by hoist! Instead, we took the Quincy and Torch Lake Cog Railway, which replaced the original tramway in 1890. This cogwheel tram, installed in 1997, moved along cogs in the tracks to maintain its speed, and it was a slow but sure descent with great views of Houghton along the way!
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The tour group disembarked from the tram at the mine’s Level 7 entrance. At 325 feet underground, Level 7 out of nearly 90 is far from the deepest, but it is the deepest level that isn’t completely submerged in groundwater! That’s all thanks to this adit, or drain, which was dug into the hillside!
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It was still super damp inside, though! There was a steady stream of water running along the right-hand side, and it was plenty drippy. We were scheduled to walk 2,000 feet deep into the mine, the farthest we could safely venture!
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Along the way, we passed a… classroom? Yup, what better way was there to learn about mining than to learn from inside a mine? In the 1970s, aspiring mining engineers from Michigan Tech University carved out this classroom on Level 7 to join theory with practice!
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All along the way, there were little relics of the mine’s active days, like this ore cart! From here, with the big light in the background, it’s really easy to see just how soggy it was down here!
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Then, a surprise! I met another tiny traveler like myself, named Duck! Duck was traveling with a Mom and daughter duo and was very scared of the dark! I decided I’d stick with Duck for the rest of the tour just to show her that it wasn’t so bad at all!
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Just as we approached the end of the line, the perfect illustration! Up top is a map of the mine’s many, many levels! Down below are some huge chunks of the ore that the miners would push in carts down long tunnels to the hoist! This could only be done after a trio of them had taken turns by candlelight holding then hammering an iron spike into the rock (made my paws hurt just thinking about it) to be filled with a stick of dynamite!
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As dangerous as this three-part process sounded, it turns out it was great for friendship! With the advent of the pneumatic drill, miners had to start spending long hours, in the dark, alone, and that, added onto all the other indignities of being a corporate mine worker, led to the Copper Country strikes of 1913 and 1914, during which the Italian Hall disaster took place!
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But this was also a hands-on tour, and after a demonstration of pitch-blackness, essential for any mine or cave tour, folks got to try their hands at pushing one of the Quincy Mine’s ore carts! I didn’t stand a chance, so I have to hand it to those miners (and some of my fellow visitors) for their serious strength!
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On the way out, the tour guide offered to take us somewhere a little off the beaten path, and by a little, he meant a lot! We journeyed past disconnected ventilation tubes and rotted supports to stare down into one of the less stabilized shafts, reminding me of the old Nietzsche quote about staring too long into the abyss. And wouldn’t you know it, right next to that abyss was a ritualistic pentagram! Well, if you need a good dark place for a summoning, a mine is a terrible thing to waste!
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And with that, the tour group funneled out of Level 7 of the Quincy Mine. I’d just had a taste of Copper Country, which fills the entirety of the Keweenaw Peninsula, but I was nearly 5 hours from my hotel and really, really wanted to be back before it got too dark. After all, I was going to need to get up super early and drive straight down to Detroit for my flight home. It’s kind of amazing to think about how much ground I covered in a weekend! ‘Til next time, Michigan!
I’m quittin’ the Mitten!
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Total Ground Covered: 893.0 mi (1,436.1 km) |
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