Graham Jaehnig/Daily Mining Gazette The Quincy Mining Company’s dredge, seen in this photo taken last fall, sits on the shore of Torch Lake.

By GRAHAM JAEHNIG

Daily Mining Gazette, Houghton

HOUGHTON — A dredge that has sat on the shore of Torch Lake in Osceola Township since 1967 is still under consideration for rehabilitation.

The Houghton County Historical Society owns the dredge, while Osceola Township owns the land on which it rests. Quincy Mine Hoist Association officials are seeking grant funding to rehabilitate the hulk as part of its efforts at preserving and interpreting the industrial landscape related to the former Quincy Mining Company. The ultimate goal is to rehabilitate the dredge to create an interpretive museum.

The dredge is worth preserving, QMHA Executive Director Tom Wright said.

“It is a historic resource, it’s a community resource,” he said. “One of the goals in this is we want to shut down the vandalism and desecration of the dredge,”

The dredge is significant to the mining history of the region for several reasons. It represents an element of industrial technology that was integral to Michigan copper production, and to refining.

In 1914, Engineering and Mining Journal published an article in which it described it as “a hydraulic dredge of unusual design.”

What made it unusual was that most dredges designed for mining were “bucket dredges.” The dredges built for the Calumet and Hecla, and the Quincy mining companies, were designed to vacuuming the lake floor.

The hydraulic vacuum dredge was designed and built for the Calumet and Hecla Mining Company in 1914 by the Bucyrus Company of Milwaukee, according to the Engineering and Mining Journal.

Its purpose was to vacuum stamp tailings from the bottom of Torch Lake, 100 feet below the surface.

Another peculiarity is while most dredges were powered by steam, then later by diesel engines, the Quincy dredge was electrically powered. While not unheard of, by the turn of the 20th century they were not common.

According to Teledyne Marine Corporation, since their inception in the late 1800s, hydraulic dredges were typically steam-powered. Designed and developed for near-shore and in-shore sediment transportation, hydraulic dredges were initially used to maintain sufficient channel depths to facilitate river navigation, port access and development.

From 1914 to 1947, the dredge vacuumed tailings from C&H’s five mill sites on the lakeshore. When the Quincy Mining Company had a facility of its own built for processing its own mill tailings in 1943, the dredge had reached the limits of it capacity and was sold to the QMC. From 1956 to 1967, Quincy used the dredge until it suspended operations at its reclamation plant.

Between 1914 and 1947, the dredge reclaimed more than 37 million tons of tailings, which produced almost 418 million pounds of refined copper. Under Quincy, it reclaimed another 50,000 tons of tailings. When Quincy closed its reclamation plant on May 6, 1967, the dredge was brought to shore and remains where it has been for the past 58 years.

While dredges were used in gold mining in western states, in Michigan, they were only used by C&H and Quincy, and only operated on Torch Lake. Of the four vacuum dredges once operating there, only the Quincy dredge remains.

Two dredges owned by C&H were sold for scrap decades ago, and Quincy’s No. 1 Dredge sank in Torch Lake in January 1956, when its hull developed a leak. Before its bilge pumps could be made operational, the dredge broke through the ice and sank.

George Kiiskila, QMHA vice president, said that if funding is secured, the plan is to place the dredge in permanent dry dock in its current vicinity, and rehabilitate it for museum purposes.

“We would probably try to make it so that visitors could walk around it and actually walk up on the boom,” he said. “We could put decent stairways inside so people can walk around inside of it.”

Graham Jaehning can be reached at 906-482-1500 or gjaehnig@mininggazette.com.