Sisu, Part 3: "Warp World"

September, 2010.

In the morning we woke up and explored the many ruins on the other side of the road after breaking camp. Turns out the ruined structure we had stealth-camped in was the Quincy Mine's former dry house, built in 1860:

The dry house is basically like a locker room where miners can change out of their wet filthy clothes after their shift and take a shower before putting on dry clothes, hence the name.

The Quincy #4 and #7 were visible across the road:

The Quincy name may sound familiar to Bostonians…that’s because many of the early investors and controllers of Keweenaw copper interests were Boston-area firms. Some of the prosperity and architectural beauty of Boston was (quite literally) found in Michigan soil.

You can see there has been some stabilization done here…mortar had been added and some brush cleared away since I last explored Quincy Mine in 2006.

We headed down into Houghton again for breakfast at the Soumi Bakery, and just as before, we had them pack us two cold pasties to go, and a loaf of the nisu bread as well. Damn that stuff is good.

We had a moment of debate over what else to explore today since we didn’t really have time to go all the way to the Porkies. We eventually chose to head out to Freda and see the ruins of the Redridge Dam and the Champion Stamp Mill. Along the Liminga Road to Freda, I noticed the temp needle on my dash climb a little higher than normal, so I decided to pull over and top off the coolant reservoir. The car did its usual Exorcist impression, but by this time it had been barfing clear water for some time. We let it cool off, refilled it, and continued.

As I talked about in my previous Redridge Dam post, it was built in 1901 to create a reservoir of water to supply the five stamp mills refining copper in the area. There were only two other steel dams ever built in America; one was in Arizona, and one was in Montana, marking a period of a couple years where steel construction was tinkered with as a method for dam-building, because it could be constructed more quickly and cheaply than a masonry dam.

We were able to climb up through the holes that had been cut in it to prevent it from overtopping after it was abandoned. I imagine this might be a pretty epic spot to watch the spring runoff when the thaw comes to Copper Country in April.

The old steel bulkhead was pitted and worn from a century of weathering...the long rods you see are the shafts that turned the relief valves when they were manually opened or closed:

Continuing on our way down the western slope along the winding road to Lake Superior’s roaring coast and the flyspeck hamlet of Freda, we reached the grand panoramic ruins of the Champion Stamp Mill:

I of course checked this place out before in 2007 and wrote about it in a previous post. I also more recently wrote about exploring the Champion Mine.

Photo by Hank

Photo by Hank

As we were about done and ready to head back to the car with a freshly refilled water jug for the radiator, we spied something I had never seen the first time I was here. A tunnel...?

Hank and I traded glances momentarily, our respective eyebrows slowly gaining in altitude, before pocket fumbling for flashlights and setting our water jugs down off to the side. Gingerly we set foot inside the large tunnel. Allow me to queue-up the appropriate music.

As I said earlier, copper ore stamping requires a lot of water. I’m thinking perhaps this was related to the water supply for the Champion Mill; I already had seen evidence of a network of small tunnels running all around under this complex.

It was dark but oddly enough we could see dim light in the distance; almost like a room of some sort was ahead.

We slowly advanced along the trickling stream running through the center of the tunnel. We could see that we indeed were coming to a room, which had a tiny bit of natural light coming into it.

Through...a skylight?

Wow...very odd.

It appeared we were in a junction room where several drains merged together…there were three more tunnel openings, but they were all sealed except for one. Some kind of pulley on the ceiling here as well:

We peeked through the rotted broken wood to see a very long corridor full of ferns and junk, lit from above through ceilings that apparently opened up to the sky…

…where the hell were we?!

Bizarre. On the left side of this large room was a steel ladder, and I now felt compelled to climb up it to perhaps get some kind of idea where this tunnel had taken us:

Dungeon Master: "The corridor splits into three passageways. There is also a ladder in this room. Which way do you wish to go, left, right, forward, or up?"

"Epor"

Expecting to pop up inside another mill or reservoir building of some kind, I was completely caught off guard when I came up into a tiny outhouse-sized wooden shack in the middle of a dense forest!

But where the hell were the concrete structures atop our underground water system? How could there be skylighted tunnels running underground here and yet no sign of anything manmade above ground?

I climbed a small wrung ladder built into the short concrete wall surrounding the little hut I’d come out of, and looked out a bit further…I could see that the forest had in fact grown up on top of a vast concrete floor with tons of square holes in it. How completely bizarre...

I looked down into one of the square holes and saw stagnant water. It was a swamp…underneath the forest...separated by a concrete floor…so weird.  I lowered my camera down in to take this shot:

I peered through the woods as I heard Hank coming up out of the tunnels behind me…the square holes seemed to go off into the distance for at least a hundred yards. Wow…

We started to wander out into the dense thicket. This was a lot bigger than it looked…It seemed to be everywhere underneath us…like there was more than just the three tunnels we had seen in the underground room…there had to be at least six that I saw the roofs of here. All running parallel. Plus on the edge of it all ran a concrete trench that had filled with water like a river, and become its own bog:

It felt like we had discovered something that no one else knew about…there was no graffiti, or empty bottles or trash. This was so overgrown and hidden from everything around it that it felt like we had gone through the secret “Warp World” shortcut in Super Mario Bros. It was in severe decay…I was almost afraid to be walking around on top of this for fear it would give in and I would plunge into a subterranean swamp.

This reminded me a lot of the Marlborough Ruins.

Surprisingly, we weren’t being mobbed by mosquitoes—seems like this would be the perfect breeding ground. We both began exploring upstream; I wanted to see where the hell this shit originated from. Would we find a dam?

Well, it kept going…and going. We must’ve walked for about 300 yards before we saw a change in the terrain of square concrete holes.

Finally they dead-ended at an embankment with large concrete slabs jutting out of the forest floor at weird angles. We climbed over those and saw that behind all this was a swamp. It looked like it had been dammed at one time, but had now merely overgrown to a ridiculous extent.

I asked Dave Clark, a knowledgeable colleague on CopperCountryExplorer, and he said,

Believe it or not, I've been in there before. That's supposedly part of the "coal attics"... I guess there was some sort of a conveyor system under all of those crazy cement holes in the ground, which would move coal through the big tunnel and out to the boiler (on the other side of the road). 

If you go far enough back, there's something big that looks like an earthen dam. Perhaps it was an approach for a rail line.

In retrospect, the “coal attic” theory does seem more a little more supported by the evidence than a drain or water supply system I think. But it is curious that the head of the tunnel system is a swamp that appears to be dammed and drained by it, as if it were once a reservoir….

At that point we decided it was about time to head back to civilization and get on the road home. We went through Houghton again, but as we were traveling south going through Chassell, my car started making a funny noise. We figured it was that exhaust rattle again as a result of having knicked the frame on the trail to the Ojibwe. Car still ran fine though…

CLICK for part four.

References:
The Copper Empire, A Historical Atlas of Michigan's Copper Country, by Mike Forgrave
Upper Peninsula of Michigan, An Inventory of Historic Engineering and Industrial Sites, HAER, 1978

Of Stamps, & Smelters (Part 1)

Upper Peninsula, May 2007.

I resolved to execute a trip back to the Houghton area as soon as spring sprung in da Yoopee, to find some new ruins that had been brought to my attention. I also wanted to finally check out the ruins of the Fayette State Park, which is a "preserved" ghost town.

Fayette used to be a disgusting industrial hellhole based around an iron smelter for the Jackson Iron Co., and for a long time after that business dried up, it sat forgotten. Now its ruins are a tranquil, beautiful state park. It's located near the bottom tip of the Garden Peninsula, which juts down into Lake Michigan. This is one of the more remote places in da Yoopee. 

My plan (as always) was mostly to just "wing it" though there was some suave calculation on my part; I struck during the week before Memorial Day weekend, right at the beginning of Bug Season. Why have I capitalized "Bug Season?" Because it's a "thing" here.

The week before, while I was looking (unsuccessfully) for the ancient stone ruins in Negwegon State Park south of Alpena, I could just see clouds of mosquitos riving around like wisps of smoke. And I heard a sound like the high-pitched whine of big truck tires at high speed on the interstate. Then it occurred to me that I-75 was much too far away to be heard. The sound was that of the googolplexes of swarming mosquito wings. Thank god I was wearing 100% DEET, or I would've been sucked so dry by those bastards I woulda been nailhed-style jerky.

Anyway, going during dreaded Bug Season (and during the week) means no tourist traffic clogging the freeway. And before Memorial Day means no demented hike on gas prices. I slept in my car at Naubinway like usual, then continued on in the morning. The outside of my car had become encased in mosquitoes overnight.

Here's one of the furnaces:

The iron mining operations of Michigan existed in two main areas, the Gogebic Range in the southwestern Yoopee, and the Marquette Range in the central Yoopee. Iron ore mined in the Marquette Range would be sent by rail to the ports of Lake Superior (mainly Marquette) where it would be loaded onto freighters, and ore mined in the Gogebic Range would be sent by rail to ports on Lake Michigan (mainly Escanaba). Thus, each range served a different market, and accordingly, different steel-making cities.

Inside, it looks like there's still some slag left behind:

But often, in the early days before the transportation lines were able to support very much capacity, iron was smelted before it was shipped to the steel mill. That way there was not as much material to load onto a ship once it was purified, so little smelting towns like Fayette grew up along the shores of the lakes where it was convenient to do so. One thing that was needed was plenty of timber to feed the charcoal kilns, which in turn produced charcoal to fuel the smelter. A supply of quality limestone was also needed. Fayette filled that bill perfectly.

Just outside the furnace building was a set of charcoal kilns; conical structures that used to be a much more common sight in the Upper Peninsula of yore:

As ships got bigger and more numerous, the shipping lanes got safer, and the forests got depleted, iron smelting faded away from the Yoopee, leaving behind these monolithic ruins. Through the late 1800s when these sites were left to moulder, the hollow-domed structures of the charcoal kilns easily caved in, while the heavy-duty furnaces remain mostly intact.

Just beyond the charcoal kilns was a small lime kiln as well, for a complete set:

Jackson Iron Co. built the Fayette Smelter in 1867 and it operated until 1891 when the nearby forest was nearly used up. The Jackson Mine itself closed in 1901, and was later bought up by Cleveland-Cliffs. Oddly enough however, the eerie ruins and ghost town that remained here became a sort of tourist attraction after the turn of the century. Boats full of tourists, vacationers, and early ruin pornographers came from Escanaba often enough to justify keeping the town's old inn open for many years thereafter:

I walked the shattered limestone shoreline for a couple miles around the entire harbor, and basked in the pristine solitude for several hours.

There were many old foundations scattered in the woods along the peninsula, that used to belong to the houses of the village:

Some were still standing:

One was accessible...

Archaeology is even being conducted in many areas of the site:

From Fayette I trekked to the Superior shore on M-94 and arrived in Copper Country by evening. As I was cruising along Lake Superior outside of L'Anse, I saw a huge Bald Eagle soaring down along the beach. I'd always known they hung out up north and could be found, but it was crazy to see one cruising next to my car as I drove along the pristine beach.

Before sunset I made it out to Freda, an absolutely minuscule settlement that has been classified by some as a ghost town, though about 20 people still live there on the shores of mighty Lake Superior. I came to check out the ruins of the Champion Stamp Mill there. 

 

There are the ruins of four other stamp mills in the immediate vicinity, belonging to the Atlantic Mine, Baltic Mine, Adventure Mine, and Trimountain Mine, but they are all on private property, so I was forced to pass them up for now. Naturally, the Champion Mill processed ore from the Champion Mine.

Anyways, there is a cliff with a veteran's monument overlooking the ruins of the Champion Mill on the lake. Reading through the names of Freda's war dead from WWII, Korea, Vietnam, etc., I noticed that there were often several in a row with the same family name. Almost all of the names were Finnish.

 

Copper County Explorer explains that the Atlantic Mill was built first, in 1895, and the rest were built by 1901. The Champion Mill was the only one of the five to survive until the end of the Michigan copper mining era in the 1960s.

The many ruined concrete nubs you see in this vast open space once held machinery that was (believe it or not) all contained under one roof. The machinery that broke down the copper ore into finer and finer pieces started at the top where it was dumped into the mill from an elevated rail line, and as it was refined the ore was moved down to each successively lower level of the mill to undergo different operations.

Naturally, stamping copper ore into slime required a lot of water (to pollute), so any stamp mill worth its salt is going to be located near a large lake. 

Just up the trail from the mill ruin were some pretty impressive sandstone cliffs:

From Freda I went to the very nearby Redridge (an even smaller town) to check out the old Redridge Dam. It was built in 1901, meaning that I was visiting it on or about its 106th birthday. With five gargantuan stamp mills clustered on this part of the Superior shore all chugging away at full force a vast supply of water was needed, so they created a reservoir on the Salmon Trout River.

Redridge Dam is unique; there were only two other steel dams ever built in America. One was in Arizona, and one was in Montana, marking a period of a couple years where steel construction was tinkered with as a method for dam-building, because it could be constructed more quickly and cheaply than a masonry dam. 

 

What sets Redridge apart from the other two is that instead of having its supports anchored into bedrock, it needed a concrete foundation due to the local sandstone here being too brittle to use. It was designed and built by the Wisconsin Bridge & Iron Company. By the way, the dam in Arizona failed in 1908 and was destroyed, so only Michigan's and Montana's steel dams remain today.

"In 1888, the only dwellings at the mouth of the Salmon Trout River were five wigwams," Lawrence Molloy says in Guide to Michigan's Historic Keweenaw Copper District. By 1894, they were gone; the first timber dam here was constructed that year by the Atlantic Mining Co., whose stamp was the first one built in this area. But of course as they expanded and the Baltic Mill joined the scene, a bigger reservoir was needed, which was when the massive steel wall you see here (and the elevated railroad line crossing it) came into being.

One would think that a stamp mill built on Lake Superior would just pump its water straight from the lake, and most of them did. But for whatever reason, the first two mills that were built here--Atlantic and Baltic--chose to build a dam all the same.  

After the mines of the southern copper range closed, the engineers ceased maintaining Redridge Dam, and left its valves open to allow water to pass through safely. But there were still times when it would flood, such as on Easter morning of 1941, possibly due to a sudden snowmelt. Finally, rectangular holes were cut in the bottom of the dam in 1979 to drain the reservoir and keep the water level down. When that happened, the original c.1894 timber dam behind it was revealed once again:

After I was done ogling the forest of iron that makes up the dam's supports, I slept in my car again partially because there were no campsites around, and partly to avoid the mosquitos.

CLICK for part two.

References:
http://www.coppercountryexplorer.com/explorations/mills/champion-mill/
Guide to Michigan's Historic Keweenaw Copper District, by Lawrence Molloy
Upper Peninsula of Michigan, An Inventory of Historic Engineering and Industrial Sites, HAER, 1978