Copper mining and old towns

Staying on the water has its advantages as we got to see a boat go under a bridge that was not a drawbridge, and then the bridge was lowered and vehicles once again started across. 

I love bridges.  We went across this one and it's grated.

On Friday, Sept. 25, we drove a few miles to Calumet, Michigan.  Calumet is a historic old copper mining town that is being revived and renovated.  It was originally known as Red Jacket until 1929 and was directly tied to the Calumet and Hecla Mining Company.  The copper mining eventually ceased but beautiful old buildings remain.  There are a number of museums and we walked around taking photos. 

This interesting fire alarm is on the side of the firefighter's museum.

The fog rolled in and out the entire time we were in Calumet, making for some eerie photos and the thoughts of ghosts from the past.

One of the buildings is the Copper Country Fire Fighter’s History museum, shown above.  It was originally a fire station, made of Lake Superior sandstone and built in 1898.  We wandered in.  The lower floor houses old fire trucks, both the horse-driven and mechanized types.  The upper floor has memorabilia but some parts of the old building were under construction.

Horse-drawn tanks came after the first modern firefighting equipment ... a hand-drawn tank from which water was pumped under pressure by means of an eight-man, long-handled pump.

 

It's come a long ways from the colonial days and bucket brigades that relayed pails of water to the fire and back to the well to be refilled.  Everything was so packed in we didn't try to get in close to any of the vehicles.

 

Come to find out a worker found us and told us the place wasn’t open and we shouldn’t be in there.  Whoops.  We took a few more photos and exited.

 

It was a pretty plain Jane existence.  You can see the fireman's pole between the beds that they used to get to the first floor where the vehicles were parked and ready to go.

Calumet had, at its peak, 34 churches.  Of those, 9 are still standing and being used for non-religious uses, 14 have been demolished and 11 are still active. 

 

The Slovenian immigrants who came to work in the mines established the wood frame St. Joseph Roman Catholic Church in 1890.  A fire destroyed the church in 1902 and they began construction the following year on this elegant church built of locally-quarried Jacobsville sandstone.  It was completed in 1908 at a cost of $100,000.  The stained glass windows came from Ford Brothers Glass Studio of Minneapolis.  In 1966, four parishes consolidated, making this building their church and changing the name to St. Paul the Apostle.

There are still a lot of bars.  I wonder if any of those ever closed.

Shute's Saloon (Marco Curto's Saloon) was one of 48 bars in Red Jacket in 1900.  By 1908 they numbered 78 strong.  While the main floor of Shute's has always been a working saloon, members of Local 413 of the Cigar Maker's Union held meetings on the second floor around 1900.  Shute's retains many original interior features, including a stained-glass canopy over the bar.

We spoke with a young lady outside of this building.  She and her husband have purchased it and are working on renovations.  Their dream is to restore it and reopen it as a market, in keeping with its history.

Another building that drew my attention was the former Michigan Hotel.  The hotel apparently served a very elite clientele, providing carriage service to bring its patrons from the railroad depot.  It has beautiful yellow, green and red trim, and even now is eye-catching.

The Michigan Hotel was designed by Charles W. Maass as a showplace for the Bosch Brewing Company.

Red Jacket (Calumet) was not without culture.  By 1898 the village had a surplus in its treasury and local leaders decided to expand the town hall by adding a 1,200-seat opera house.  The theater opened March 20, 1900, with numerous well-known performers making their way to its stage over the years, including John Phillip Sousa, Sarah Bernhardt, Jason Robards, Sr., and Douglas Fairbanks, Sr.

The Calumet Theater was one of the first municipal theaters in America.  It was the "greatest social event ever known in copperdom's metropolis," and even boasted an electrified copper chandelier.  John Philli

One of the more famous buildings is the Italian Hall that was home to the Societa Mutua Beneficenza Italiana, an organization that aided immigrants and others in need.  It was built in 1908 and housed a saloon and a tea company store on the first floor.  There was a main hall with a dining room, a bar room and a stage on the second floor.  It also hosted meetings of the Western Federation of Miners. 

This is the Italian Hall on December 25, 1913.

The hall was the site of one of Michigan’s worst tragedies during a copper miner’s strike in 1913-1914.  After five months of the strike, Italian Hall was the location for a party for the striking workers and their families, in an effort to help lift spirits and improve morale.  On Christmas Eve 1913, 73 people, most of which were children, died due to a false alarm of “Fire.”  They died trying to exit the building down a single staircase. 

The arch to the hall was of a variety of colored stones.  The arch was located at the left side of the hall.

 Meetings continued to be held there, but the building’s condition deteriorated and it was torn down in 1984; however, the archway from the main entrance was saved and in 1989 a park on the site was created and dedicated to those who died in 1913.

The arch is a beautiful piece of architecture, but a sad reminder of a tragedy that shouldn't have happened.

As we were headed out of town a large piece of equipment parked next to the road caught our eye.  It was an old snowplow.  The Calumet and Hecla Mining Company couldn’t afford to let winter derail its operation, even in a remote region that can receive up to 300 inches of snow a year.   So, they used a steam locomotive to push the Russell Snowplow through the snowdrifts to open the line.

I thought the color of the snowplow quite appropriate for all and Halloween.

While seeing the snowplow as we were leaving seemed to end our tour of Calumet, a tall tower across the street seemed unique enough to make a detour through a school yard.  The tower is attached to a building that wasn’t nearly as interesting.  Except, that the building was the old Superior Boiler House. 

The Superior Boiler House.

All of these remaining buildings and mine shafts have a rich history, and the ones here, including a railroad round house, a gear house, a dry house where miners changed soiled clothes for clean ones, and a warehouse, surround a school and its yard.  Supposedly by having the Calumet and Hecla Mining Company administrative building and other buildings here they could influence the curriculum and activities.

The Superior Boiler House used coal to produce the steam power for the buildings.  What had attracted me to the building is the beautiful stack made of brick that is not just a round stack, but has angles and is absolutely gorgeous with some greenery growing at its base. 

The tower was spectacular with its wonderful angles and greenery growing along side. 

So far, my short tour of Michigan has been a fun time, but it isn’t over.  Now we’re starting our shoreside visit of Lake Superior and our lighthouse tour.