The Upper Peninsula of Michigan’s Keweenaw Peninsula forms an approximately 50-mile-long and 15-mile-wide projection into Lake Superior and represents the northernmost point in the state. The Lake Superior Copper Range located there held vast deposits of copper, making the area an attractive, albeit remote, site for copper mining. Knowledge of the rich copper resources in the region predates white European settlement, with many prehistoric mine pits in the area dating back thousands of years. The oldest verified evidence of metalworking in North America is an approximately 7,000-year-old spear point made of Lake Superior copper. Other archeological objects recovered include beads, awls, jewelry and fishhooks made of regionally sourced copper.
17th and 18th century Europeans were drawn to the region by tales of plentiful copper, further spurred by the discovery of The Ontonagon Builder, a 3,700-pound mass of pure copper found on the banks of the Ontonagon River in 1843. The copper rush that ensued resulted in at least 300 mining operations launched between 1840-1860.
The Quincy Mine Company was established in 1846 as part of the settlement of a land dispute between two other mining companies. At the time, the land was densely forested and required the QMC to invest in several years of clearing and exploratory digging to establish a large-scale mining operation. The town of Hancock, located just south of the Quincy Mine is a quintessential “company town”, growing and and developing to meet the needs of the miners and their families. In about 1860, the Quincy Mining Company’s Pewabic lode shafts resulted in better fortunes and began a long-standing record of turning shareholder profits, paying dividends every year from 1862-1920, earning the mine the nickname “Old Reliable”. At this point the mine employed over 450 men and the company had built hundreds of homes, the earliest homes had no preplanned arrangement and simply dotted the landscape.
As development progressed, neighborhoods began to be arranged in a more orderly manner, with regular spacing and oriented to streets. In addition to housing, QMC established a farm, leased plots for worker-gardens, donated lands for churches, built boarding houses, and constructed a school building in addition to many surface plant improvements to support mining operations.
The shaft-rockhouse was an interesting architectural adaptation unique to Keweenaw, a combination of the workings of a shafthouse and those of a rockhouse in a single building. Copper-laden rock was lifted high, then dropped through a series of crushing and sorting equipment, ending up in waiting rail cars at the bottom. The No 6 shaft-rockhouse was a monumental building, over 100 feet in height, with a downward stepping gabled profile that expressed the industrial process within it.
By the turn of the century, as an expression of corporate strength, an elegant new office building was constructed of Portage Entry limestone and topped with a slate roof. A new steel-framed shaft-rockhouse was constructed in 1908 at the No 2 shaft and is the one that can be seen today. A highly decorative hoist house was built to service the No 2 shaft in 1918 as a showplace for installation of the largest steam hoist in the world. The hoist was necessitated by the great depth the mine had reached, over 6,000 vertical feet, making Quincy the deepest mine in the US and one of the deepest in the world. The hoist house was designed by J.H. Hoff and built at a cost of over $96,000. The total cost of the building and hoist was over $370,000. The building featured red brick, classical detailing, large windows, and a green tile roof. The hoist itself was not installed until 1920 having been delayed by World War I. The building still stands, one of the most impressive pieces of architecture still present at the site, although the tile roof has long since been replaced. The hoist operated until the mine shut down underground operations in 1931. Company operations continued with the reclamation of copper from waste material until 1967. The 1980’s and 90’s saw portions of the site remediated under the guidance of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).
The Keweenaw National Historical Park was established in 1992. Most of the Quincy Mine site is owned by the Quincy Mine Hoist Association, The National Park Service (NPS), and Michigan Technological University (MTU) who are working in partnership to preserve and maintain the site and educate the public about the region’s rich copper mining heritage.
For more information visit the National Park Service website https://www.nps.gov/kewe/planyourvisit/index.htm
For tour information visit the Quincy Mine Association website https://quincymine.com/