The Home of Copper: Neglected but still proud in its decay

Autumn in the Mid-West can be spectacular as the leaves change to the colour of copper. That also means everyone has gone home from their summer holidays. It’s time to get on the road and go visit friends. Copper is also a hint for why we will be heading there; it was copper mining that changed history in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan.

A little history and a little geography

Some of my wife’s ancestors immigrated here to the Keweenaw Peninsula in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan from various countries in Europe in the 1850s to 1870s. They came to find work in the copper mines and to better their lives. We wanted to mine for their personal history, see what they found and what their lives might have been like.

The Upper Peninsula begs to be a quiz show question: which state is in two halves separated by a stretch of water? It’s the Upper Peninsula of Michigan separated by the Straights of Mackinac from the Lower Peninsula of Michigan.

The drive from Chicago to the Keweenaw Peninsula can be done in one hit, but it makes for a very long day’s driving. Call it about eight hours non-stop and 500 miles.

Up to Iron Mountain

Let’s break up the journey and call in on two friends who live on the Menominee River. Iron Mountain is in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. It was a once thriving and prosperous town built on mining for iron ore. Sadly, it spent years declining after iron ore mining became unprofitable. It’s a familiar story across America’s Rust Belt.

A wonderful dinner all made from local produce (Q. Why didn’t I take a picture? A. I was too busy enjoying the food!) with much “spirited” conversation. The following morning, we enjoyed a hearty breakfast and were ready to continue our way further north. Our destination, Copper Harbor, is, putting it mildly, a little remote.

Keweenaw Peninsula — home to copper

Zoom into a satellite picture of North America until you see the outline of Lake Superior. The last of the ice age glaciers retreated 10,000 years ago, and what they left behind was a giant puddle. Lake Superior holds nearly 10% of the world’s surface fresh water.

On the southern shoreline of Lake Superior, you will see what looks like ET’s finger pointing out into the lake. This is the Keweenaw peninsula. From the mid-1850s to the late 1940s, it was the centre of one of the industrial world’s most important commodities. Copper. Mining for copper changed history.

Why here? The Keweenaw peninsula was part of the Mid-continent Rift around a billion years ago. Volcanic activity produced the only strata on earth where large-scale recoverable copper is found.

Mining for copper goes back to about 3000 BCE. It’s known that ancient indigenous people were producing artefacts here at that time and traded them throughout North America. 

Modern-day industrial-scale mining began in the 1850s to meet the growing industrial world’s need for copper. By 1861, and the start of the American Civil War, demand increased still further.

What is a “Yooper”?

Soon immigrants fleeing Europe began arriving from Cornwall, Finland, Italy, northern Germany, and Sweden to settle in the Keweenaw peninsula. 

John Peter Klingkamer arrived in 1855 from Bodenbach in the Eifel region of Germany to be a miner. John Charles Opie arrived in 1872 from Wendron in Cornwall to continue as a copper miner in his new country. Their grandchildren would later marry in 1921 and in turn become my wife’s grandparents. And our friend in Copper Harbor’s family arrived from Finland at about the same time.

All brought elements of their culture, from ice fishing to beer-brewing, from pasta rolling to baking Cornish Pasties and to making wurst. Eventually, they melded together into a group known as “Yoopers” (Translation: people living in the Upper Peninsular or UP of Michigan). 

Yoopers by nature are ready for a winter storm almost every day of the year. And Yoopers have a culture of self-sufficiency and a love of the outdoors.

A boom in copper demand

Copper mining boomed from Houghton and Calumet at the southern end of the Keweenaw peninsula all the way to Copper Harbor at the northern end. The US Army established Fort Wilkins just outside of Copper Harbor to help maintain law and order during the copper rush. 

The region remained prosperous right through to WWII, when the US government introduced strict price controls on copper to prevent price gouging that caused production to decline and ultimately collapse. What remained were abandoned mines, mining equipment that no one needed, and with a workforce looking for what would come next.

Houghton managed to start an engineering college, which eventually became a well-regarded Michigan Technological University. The town has also pivoted towards tourism.

The Quincy copper mine

The Quincy Mine, located in Hancock across the Keweenaw River, preserved its history and became an excellent primer on what it was like to be a miner. The geology that made mining possible, and the equipment used to extract copper ore.

Marquette still has an Ore Dock that was used to load copper ore from rail cars to ships waiting to transport the ore to processing plants.

Heavy metal

While mining in the Keweenaw Peninsula has ceased, the western end of Lake Superior and Duluth is still the starting point for freighters loaded with iron ore and grain to make their way east through the Great Lakes. The locks in Sault Sainte Marie (known locally as “The Soo”) are the gateway to Lake Huron which is used to transport iron ore to Cleveland and Pittsburgh. 

Copper Harbor today has also pivoted to tourism. In winter, visitors bring snowmobiles to ride the hills overlooking the town. In summer visitors come to camp, walk the trails, fish, and sail. 

Pictured Rocks

A little further to the east, past the college town of Marquette, named for Jacques Marquette, the French, and Jesuit explorer, is Pictured Rocks.

When nature creates art

The geologic formations of Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore are 50-200 ft. deep and date to the Late Precambrian, Cambrian, and Early Ordovician Periods (500-800 million years ago).

These sandstone cliffs extend for more than 15 miles along the shoreline and give you a good idea of what this area might have looked like, from subtropical inland seas to ice ages.

The name “Pictured Rocks” comes from the streaks of mineral stain that decorate the cliffs when groundwater oozes out of cracks and trickles down the rock face. Iron (red and orange), copper (blue and green), manganese (brown and black), and limonite (white) are among the most common colour-producing minerals.

How did all these photographs get taken?

I dislike carrying lots of equipment, so try to minimize what I take with me. This trip was essentially wide angle, so I took my Leica CL, my Leica TL 11-23 mm lens, a Sigma 30mm lens, and a TL 55-135 lens. In the end, I could have skipped the Sigma but thought autumnal evenings might require a fast lens. The TL11-23 basically lived on the camera, with a few shots taken with the TL55-135. You learn from experience what to leave at home.

One last look

Most Americans have ancestry that brought them from other parts of the globe. They weighed the risks of staying against leaving; they made long, arduous journeys to America and built new lives because their old worlds no longer offered them a future.

Setbacks were to be expected, but they took them in their stride, reinventing themselves along the way, and kept moving forward. Yoopers are still doing that, creating new lives and new industries. Autumn may be pretty, but a new Spring is just around the corner. 

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