Like many regions of the country, the Upper Peninsula has its share of locations that are slowly fading into non-existence. These include remnants of towns that housed early settlers who flocked to the region for mining and lumber booms and agriculture.

Many of these “ghost” communities were connected to the copper mines of the Keweenaw Peninsula and adjacent lands to the south and west.

Many have not only had their physical existence vanish, but the very memories of the locations grow dimmer and dimmer as those who experienced life there pass away.

This could have been the case for a copper town that was founded in the 1860s and was vibrant until 1920, when the Winona Mining Company closed its mine and left town.

In its heyday, Winona – located about 30 miles south of Houghton on M-26 – included a hotel, boarding houses, restaurants, a brewery, saloon, stores, boardwalks, five neighborhoods, a dance hall and a barber shop.

Only a school, a church and a few homes remain.

The old mining town won’t disappear completely, though, thanks to filmmaker Michael Loukinen, a retired Northern Michigan University professor.

His documentary, “Winona: A Copper Mining Ghost Town,” was telecast Wednesday evening on local PBS station WNMU Public TV13, and will be rebroadcast at 6:30 p.m. Sunday.

Loukinen said he is fascinated by the slowly vanishing traditional subcultures that were scattered around the region, and wants to document them before they are extinct.

He has done just that for Winona, with the help from Grant Guston, chief broadcast engineer at WNMU-TV and FM radio, who worked on graphics, videography and studio engineering; and NMU students Alex Maier, who did much of the editing and nature videography, and Lauren Thomasinas and Kris Thomas who assisted with editing.

We encourage everyone to take advantage of the opportunity to get a glimpse of how life was in our region back in its early days by watching “Winona: A Copper Mining Ghost Town” at 6:30 p.m Sunday on TV 13.

After all, as Loukinen said: “If we don’t understand the past, then we don’t understand ourselves in the present.”

-Marquette Mining Journal