Copper Mining and Its Monumental Structures

The following is a guest post by Ryan Brubacher, Reference Specialist, Prints & Photographs Division.

I recently returned from an information-soaked conference in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, where I toured and learned about structures related to the fascinating history of the copper mining industry in the Keweenaw area.

When I came home, the experience was still on my mind, and I thought it would be fun to see what I could find in the Prints & Photographs Division collections that relates to the mining sites I saw in Michigan. I was highly rewarded in my quest and found related images in many different collections. In fact, I found so much interesting material that I had to find a way to narrow my scope for this post!

Many of the views you see below focus on structures from the Quincy Mining Company sites in Hancock, Michigan. Hancock is located along a narrow branch of Portage Lake across from another town called Houghton, as you can see in this 1941 photograph from the Farm Security Administration / Office of War Information Collection:

The shaft house is usually the most eye-catching structure in a mining landscape because it is the tallest, as you can see in the below photograph from a Historic American Engineering Record (HAER) survey of the Quincy Mining Company site:

One of the functions of a shaft house is to support a gigantic track that lifts and drops the skips — which are large rectangular compartments — into the depth of the mine at a diagonal angle. Skips can hold mined raw materials, water, and workers. They weigh tons and need to be lowered and lifted quickly throughout the day. This photograph from the Detroit Publishing Company Collection shows a skip filled with miners in the Number 2 shaft at Calumet Mine:

The Number 2 shaft at Quincy went through many stages of upgrades over the course of many decades. To give a sense of the scale of the operation, in 1895 the mine was already 3,600 feet deep and the mine managers planned to dig 200 feet deeper each year. This drawing from the Quincy Mining Company HAER survey shows the complexity of the shaft house structure:

A specialized engine was built to hoist the skips. The hoist engine needed its own structure, which was connected by pulley stands that carried the hoisting chain. By 1895, the speed of the skips at Number 2 had reached a rate of 2,500 to 3,000 feet per minute. This photo from the Quincy HAER survey shows a view from the top of a shaft building looking down toward a hoist house:

Later development at Quincy Shaft Number 2 involved the installation of the Nordberg Hoist, the engine shown here:

This Detroit Publishing Company view of Shaft Number 2 at Quincy Mine shows several of the structures and systems situated next to one another, including the tall shaft house, the hoist house, the hoist chain system, and the tramway that carries the copper elsewhere:

While none of the views above show the additional structures needed for processing and further transportation that complete a full mining complex, I hope they illustrate the monumental complexity of these mining operations.

Learn More:

• Study the full HABS HAER HALS survey of the Quincy Mining Company Complex, which combines hundreds of photographs with detailed drawings of the many structures on a mine site, as well as essays on the mine and its history (see PDF labeled “Data Pages” in the online catalog record).
• View company houses built for workers at the Quincy Mining Company, as seen in photographs from the survey.
• Explore more Prints & Photographs Division images related to copper mining sites in the United States.