In the company towns of Michigan's Upper Peninsula, a worker's boss did extra duty as landlord, store owner and constable. The on-site mill manager in Simmons, a town named after the furniture maker, even ran a successful baseball team. Built around iron mines and lumber concerns and directed by prominent entrepreneurs like Henry Ford, these industrial hamlets once lined the shores of Lakes Michigan and Superior. Author Christian Holmes uncovers rich stories of struggle and celebration as he explores the vestiges of these vanished communities and their lasting legacy in the identity of the Upper Peninsula.
WITH A FOREWORD BY LISA M. FINE, MICHIGAN STATE UNIVERSITY—Michigan’s Upper Peninsula is known for its natural beauty and severe winters, as well as the mines and forests where men labored to feed industrial factories elsewhere in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. But there were factories in the Upper Peninsula, too, and women who worked in them. Phyllis Michael Wong tells the stories of the Gossard Girls, women who sewed corsets and bras at factories in Ishpeming and Gwinn from the early twentieth century to the 1970s. As the Upper Peninsula’s mines became increasingly exhausted and its stands of timber further depleted, the Gossard Girls’ income sustained both their families and the local economy. During this time the workers showed their political and economic strength, including a successful four-month strike in the 1940s that capped an eight-year struggle to unionize. Drawing on dozens of interviews with the surviving workers and their families, this book highlights the daily challenges and joys of these mostly first- and second-generation immigrant women. It also illuminates the way the Gossard Girls navigated shifting ideas of what single and married women could and should do as workers and citizens. From cutting cloth and distributing materials to getting paid and having fun, Wong gives us a rare ground-level view of piecework in a clothing factory from the women on the sewing room floor.
"On Midsummer Eve, 1865, more than 30 Finnish and Sami immigrants disembarked from a Great Lakes ship to a place called Hancock, Michigan. At the time, Hancock consisted of nothing more than a small cluster of humble buildings, but it was here, on the outskirts of mid-19th-century civilization, that Finnish settlement in Michigan's Upper Peninsula (UP) took root. Much to the surprise of these new Americans, Midsummer was not a religious holiday marked by feasts in celebration of the season's prolonged sunlight. Rather, the newcomers were immediately hastened into the bowels of the earth to extract copper in pursuit of the American Dream. In short order, hardworking Finnish immigrants became reputable miners, lumberjacks, farmers, maids, and commercial fishermen. A century and a half later, the UP boasts the largest Finnish population outside of the motherland and sustains the determined spirit the Finns call sisu--an influence that remains palpable in all 15 UP counties."--
Details a century and a half of copper mining along Upper Michigan’s Keweenaw Peninsula, from the arrival of the first incorporated mines in the 1840s until the closing of the last mine in the mid-1990s. In Hollowed Ground, author Larry Lankton tells the story of two copper industries on Lake Superior-native copper mining, which produced about 11 billion pounds of the metal from the 1840s until the late 1960s, and copper sulfide mining, which began in the 1950s and produced another 4.4 billion pounds of copper through the 1990s. In addition to documenting companies and their mines, mills, and smelters, Hollowed Ground is also a community study. It examines the region's population and ethnic mix, which was a direct result of the mining industry, and the companies' paternalistic involvement in community building. While this book covers the history of the entire Lake Superior mining industry, it particularly focuses on the three biggest, most important, and longest-lived companies: Calumet & Hecla, Copper Range, and Quincy. Lankton shows the extent of the companies' influence over their mining locations, as they constructed the houses and neighborhoods of their company towns, set the course of local schools, saw that churches got land to build on, encouraged the growth of commercial villages on the margin of a mine, and even provided pasturage for workers' milk cows and space for vegetable gardens. Lankton also traces the interconnected fortunes of the mining communities and their companies through times of bustling economic growth and periods of decline and closure. Hollowed Ground presents a wealth of images from Upper Michigan's mining towns, reflecting a century and a half of unique community and industrial history. Local historians, industrial historians, and anyone interested in the history of Michigan's Upper Peninsula will appreciate this informative volume.
Michigan's Keweenaw Peninsula juts into Lake Superior, pointing from the western Upper Peninsula toward Canada. Native peoples mined copper there for at least five thousand years, but the industrial heyday of the "Copper Country" began in the late nineteenth century, as immigrants from Cornwall, Italy, Finland, and elsewhere came to work in mines largely run from faraway cities such as New York and Boston. In those cities, suburbs had developed to allow wealthier classes to escape the dirt and grime of the industrial center. In the Copper Country, however, the suburbs sprang up nearly adjacent to mines, mills, and coal docks. Sarah Fayen Scarlett contrasts two types of neighborhoods that transformed Michigan's mining frontier between 1875 and 1920: paternalistic company towns built for the workers and elite suburbs created by the region's network of business leaders. Richly illustrated with drawings, maps, and photographs, Company Suburbs details the development of these understudied cultural landscapes that arose when elites began to build housing that was architecturally distinct from that of the multiethnic workers within the old company towns. They followed national trends and created social hierarchies in the process, but also, uniquely, incorporated pre-existing mining features and adapted company housing practices. This idiosyncratic form of suburbanization belies the assumption that suburbs and industry were independent developments. Built environments evince interrelationships among landscapes, people, and power. Scarlett's work offers new perspectives on emerging national attitudes linking domestic architecture with class and gender identity. Company Suburbs complements scholarship on both industrial communities and early suburban growth, increasing our understanding of the ways hierarchies associated with industrial capitalism have been built into the shared environments of urban areas as well as seemingly peripheral American towns.
The glitter of gold created an era when a few determined prospectors searched the rugged hills and forests of Michigan's Upper Peninsula for the valuable mineral. Their stories range from the discovery of Lake Superior's mineral wealth in the 1840's to the modern mining and prospecting practices today.
Based on the popular Lost In Michigan website that was featured in the Detroit Free Press, It contains locations throughout Michigan, and tells their interesting story. There are over 50 stories and locations that you will find fascinating.
Spanning the years 1840-1875, Beyond the Boundaries focuses on the settlement of Upper Michigan's Keweenaw Peninsula, telling the story of reluctant pioneers who attempted to establish a decent measure of comfort, control, and security in what was in many ways a hostile environment. Moving beyond the technological history of the period found in his previous book Cradle to the Grave: Life, Work, and Death at the Lake Superior Copper Mines (OUP 1991), Lankton here focuses on the people of this region and how the copper mining affected their daily lives. A truly first-rate social history, Beyond the Boundaries will appeal to historians of the frontier and of Michigan and the Great Lakes region, as well as historians of technology, labor, and everyday life.
Arthur Thurner tells of the enormous struggle of the diverse immigrants who built and sustained energetic towns and communities, creating a lively civilization in what was essentially a forest wilderness. Their story is one of incredible economic success and grim tragedy in which mine workers daily risked their lives. By highlighting the roles women, African Americans, and Native Americans played in the growth of the Keweenaw community, Thurner details a neglected and ignored past. The history of Keweenaw Peninsula for the past one hundred and fifty years reflects contemporary American culture--a multicultural, pluralistic, democratic welfare state still undergoing evolution. Strangers and Sojourners, with its integration of social and economic history, for the first time tells the complete story of the people from the Keweenaw Peninsula's Baraga, Houghton, Keweenaw, and Ontonagon counties.
Touring Michigan’s Upper Peninsula (UP) is like taking a two-week trip by station wagon. Not in terms of time—you can sample plenty if four days is all you have. It’s about stepping back and appreciating a place of raw scenic beauty dotted with roadside attractions, blinker-light towns, rustic cabins, and hand-painted signs advertising smoked fish and homemade jam. With the second edition of 100 Things to Do in the Upper Peninsula Before You Die, discover a land mostly surrounded by the Great Lakes Huron, Michigan, and Superior, linked to the state’s mitten-shaped Lower Peninsula by a five-mile suspension bridge spanning the Straits of Mackinac. The UP surprises with Victorian-era and car-free Mackinac Island, millions of acres of forests, waterfalls, wildlife, remnants of the prosperous copper mining era, and 1,700 miles of spectacular shoreline. It’s home to about 311,000 hardy Yoopers (UP-ers), just 3 percent of Michigan’s population across a third of the state’s territory. Cell phone service can be spotty and the top speed along two-lane highways is 55 mph—all the better to slow down and embrace the UP, whether you’re in search of extreme sports experiences, soft adventure, or a simple slice of solitude.
