IRON MOUNTAIN – The 11th installment of Menominee Range Memories, a series of articles by William J. Cummings, Menominee Range Historical Foundation historian, now available on the Dickinson County Library’s website, focuses on the discovery of iron ore on the Menominee Iron Range.

Most of America’s iron ore had come from New York and Pennsylvania during the first part of the nineteenth century, with smaller amounts mined in Virginia, Tennessee and Alabama. However, with the discovery of iron ore along the south shore of Lake Superior near Negaunee in 1844, Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, along with portions of Wisconsin and Minnesota, became the nation’s major iron producing region by the late 1800s. Since the Upper Peninsula was so remote and underdeveloped, a dozen years elapsed before the new iron region, known as the Marquette Iron Range, began sending ore in quantity to steel mills in the East.

As the Marquette Iron Range developed, the government and private industry sent geologists and other agents to the Upper Peninsula to evaluate the area’s wealth of natural resources, particularly in terms of mineral and timber assets.

The Menominee Range was situated mainly in the valley of the Menominee River, which lies on the boundary between the Upper Peninsula of Michigan and northern Wisconsin. The fact that iron was located here seems to have been known before the Civil War, but active mining only dates back to the 1870s.

Among the early visitors to what became the Menominee Iron Range were:

George Nicholas Sanders (1812-1873), who noted in his 1844-1845 reports various veins of spar as he examined lands along the Menominee River to determine the feasibility of constructing a road from Green Bay on Lake Michigan to Copper Harbor on Lake Superior;

William Austin Burt (1762-1858), the discoverer of the Marquette Iron Range, who noted signs of iron ore in the Crystal Falls area during his linear land survey 1846;

John Wells Foster (1815-1873) and Josiah Dwight Whitney (1819-1896), who completed a geological survey of the Lake Superior region of northern Michigan in 1850, providing detailed information on major copper and iron mining regions. Their report noted large beds of ore in Section 30, Township 40 North, Range 30 West, near Lake Antoine, later the site of Iron Mountain’s famed Chapin Mine.

In 1866, two timber speculators from Menominee, Michigan brothers Thomas (1836-after 1920) and Bartley (1834-1901) Breen located iron deposits near what is now Waucedah, Michigan.

In 1870, four years after discovering the iron deposits near Waucedah, the Breen brothers, together with Judge Eleazer S. Ingalls (1820-1879) and S.P. Saxton, both prominent Menominee men, obtained title to the land on which the iron ore had been found. Saxton then sunk several test pits and cut two long trenches across the formation, but active mining operations were not fully inaugurated until the Chicago & Northwestern Railway Company completed its branch line from Powers to the Vulcan Mine in the summer of 1877.

In 1872, this site became known as the Breen Mine and marked the first mining in the district. Soon after, Dr. Nelson Powell Hulst (1842-1923), Milwaukee Iron Company geologist and chemist, began conducting extensive prospecting on the Breen property and a property that would later be known as the Vulcan Mine.

The Breen Mine was opened in 1872, and other locations opened soon afterward. However, in the fall of 1873 the development of the mine was slowed when the effect of the national economic panic hit the Menominee Range and all preparation for mining ceased. By 1874, due to the prior prospecting of Hulst and others, it became evident that mining was a valuable venture and plans were back on track.

The nearest navigable outlet for shipping Menominee Iron Range ore was located at Escanaba, on Lake Michigan’s Little Bay De Noc in Delta County.

A direct line known as the Menominee Range Railroad was constructed by the Chicago & Northwestern Railway to the Menominee Iron Range mines on the Peninslar Division from Powers which was completed as far as Quinnesec in 1877. Powers was originally known as “42” as it was located 42 miles from Menominee. During that year the Breen Mine and the Vulcan Mine (originally called the Breitung Mine) shipped a total of 10,405 tons of ore.

By 1878, five mines were actively shipping from the Menominee Iron Range, including the Breen, Cyclops, Norway, Quinnesec and the Vulcan.

By 1879, there were eight shippers moving over 200,000 tons of iron ore.

By 1880 the Chicago & Northwestern’s Menominee Range Railroad reached Iron Mountain and Florence, and in 1882 tracks were laid to Crystal Falls and Iron River.

Production at the Menominee Range had steadily increased with each passing year, and by 1882 a total of more than one and a half million tons had been mined in the first five years. In 1883, production exceeded a million tons, an amount which had taken the Marquette Iron Range more than twenty years to equal.

The Chicago, Milwaukee & St. Paul Railroad also penetrated the region and shipped ore over the Escanaba & Lake Superior line until it reached a pooling agreement for shipment over the Chicago & Northwestern’s tracks.

The best known producer was Iron Mountain’s Chapin Mine which produced nearly 26 million tons of iron ore from its opening in 1879 to its closing in 1932.

This 8-page installment of Menominee Range Memories contains an overview of early mining on the Menominee Iron Range. Additional information on the men who first explored the area, including portraits of eight of them, help understand the development of the area. Future Menominee Range Memories columns will feature much more detailed information on the development of the Menominee Iron Range, the building of the railroads and the individuals who played significant roles in the area’s iron ore industry.

Read the rest of this story on the Dickinson County Library’s website (www.dcl-lib.org). New installments will be added to the Library’s website and on the Library’s local history