Towns Dead and Dying 

On Michigan’s Keweenaw Peninsula only a very few survive who remember the days when the great copper mines thrived  

In the normal course of events a person is conceived and born, lives out his life day by day, and then dies, usually leaving no more physical evidence of his existence than a simple white marker in a field of white markers. 

The life of a town is not so different. It is conceived because there is a need for it in a particular place at a particular time, and it too is born. It lives out its life as long as that need continues--or some substitute need develops--and then it dies. But unlike a person, when a town dies it is only slightly less visible than before. More quiet, surely, but its physical presence remains. For months and years, just as before, but empty. 

They are a strange sight, the silent streets of a town that once was home to hundreds, sometimes thousands of people. If it has been newly deserted, within a year or two, there are likely to be items still on the shelves of the store and books in the library. In the school, a writing pad, covered with dust, may be on a student’s desk, and at least one badly chewed pencil is bound to remain in one of the grooved spaces. If the town has been empty for some time, thirty or forty years, there will be no such residue. There will be little of anything. Windowpanes will be in short supply; roofs and walls will be missing. But regardless of when the last church service was held or the last Fourth of July parade, it is impossible to ignore the heavy aura of the past. 

Why and how a town dies is complex. Most are subject to a trend which takes none of their individual merits into consideration: people move away from small towns and toward large cities. It is not a trend without some justification. Opportunities for employment and education are greater in urban centers, and civic services are usually better developed. And even when the elderly, who may be more tolerant of lesser conditions, choose to remain, members of the younger generations often do not; the result is a constant eroding of the town’s youth. Small towns also suffer from an absence of diversity. Many are supported by one main industry or business, and when it ceases to function or changes location, the town is left without its major employer. Mines play out, wells go dry, companies go bankrupt. 

The individual incidents may be totally different, but from town to town the progression of events is depressingly similar. A factory closes, and the bulk of people employed there move because there are no longer jobs. Those businesses which acted as support for the factory find they cannot exist without it, and they close. A few shops which were operating on a small margin of profit feel the loss of business, and they close. People are forced to shop at the next town, and all business left in the town suffers. Soon there are many empty stores and shops. More people move, civic services begin to deteriorate, and finally, the post office closes. Suddenly only a few stubborn survivors remain, and what was once a thriving community becomes a ghost town. 

This metamorphosis is not restricted to any single area. It happens everywhere. Thousands of deserted towns are scattered throughout America. Not just in the Southwest, where they followed the rapid opening and closing of the frontier at an alarming rate, but in New England and the Northwest, and especially in the central states, the Great Plains, the area that has suffered most from a constant decline in population, the shift from rural to urban concentration. Each town was unique, its personality and setting and physical appearance totally its own, yet each came to the same end. From the old town in Maine that died when its supply of birch for making spools ran out, and the boom towns in the Southwest that rose and fell with the smell of gold, to the current epidemic of decay in the Plains, in the end it is the same. A town has died; its people are gone. Homes and shops and schools, once packed with people, are now empty and silent. What was once wrested from nature with plows and axes and even guns has gone back to wildflowers and weeds. 

Even on the smallest scale, by the lone remaining stone wall of a tiny village long dead, there is an overpowering feeling of time lost, and it is very sad. It is true in Kingsbury, Maine, and in Goldfield, Nevada, and it haunts Lincoln Valley, North Dakota. And as I traveled through the lovely Keweenaw Peninsula of upper Michigan, the feeling was everywhere. Time, lost. 

• • •

Once calumet township, which includes the towns of Calumet and Laurium, was the showplace of all upper Michigan. Home of the mighty Calumet and Hecla Mining Company, it had close to sixty thousand people at the turn of the century and proudly claimed the credentials of a miniature metropolis. There were five banks and two brokerage houses, five churches, twenty-two public schools, and an endless array of bars. The Calumet opera house, opened in 1900, offered its audiences the talents of Lillian Russell and Sarah Bernhardt and performances fresh from Broadway. The Sousa and Goldman bands played there. Five trains a day came into the township, linking it with Detroit and Chicago, and its own streetcar system connected it with smaller mining towns in the area. 

And throughout that tiny peninsula at the top of the nation, mining communities were thriving. Central Mine had thirteen hundred people in 1887, and Delaware about eleven hundred. Quincy, one of the largest, at its peak had over thirteen thousand residents. 

Now the combined population of Calumet and Laurium and their little surrounding villages is close to eight thousand, and the glory that was 1900 has been relegated to stories old men tell their grandchildren on Sunday visits. The good times have left, taken away by union problems and strikes, the Depression, a dwindling copper supply, and the opening of larger mines in the West. All that remains are the ruins, ghostly reminders. Huge industrial complexes, abandoned. Schools and homes, abandoned. Near Calumet High School is the roundhouse where the company’s locomotives were housed and maintained, and it too is abandoned, the large turntable at the entrance rusted and overgrown with weeds. Walking down the main street of Laurium, one building after another is deserted. The First National Bank on the corner, the drugstore down the block; Obrien’s Club, and the store next to Kentala’s Bakery; even the Peoples Movie, all closed. 

And these are two living, functioning towns. Struggling to survive, but surviving. Most of the other communities in the area are not so healthy. With but a few possible exceptions, the entire Keweenaw—an appendage of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula—is a museum for the boom days of copper mining in the state. 

As you drive east and north from Calumet Township, the little brown signs by the side of the highway flash by like family names on mailboxes. Copper Falls, Cliff, Delaware, Mandan. From the road there is no way of knowing they mean anything more, or ever did. But slow down while easing into one of the lazy bends in U.S. Highway 41, then turn in at any one of the little placards, and the skeleton of Copper Country at the turn of the century waits to whisper to you what things were like when they were good. 

The only officially designated ghost town in the Keweenaw is Central Mine. Site of one of the more productive copper mines in the area, Central had a population approaching thirteen hundred people in the late 1800s. 

The grid of streets, laid out on the side of a hill, housed not only the homes of miners but the Methodist Church, an express and telegraph company, merchants, blacksmiths, a lawyer, a shoemaker, and a contractor, all centered around the activities of the Central Mining Company. 

Life in upper Michigan toward the end of the century was not so different from life in the small towns of the American frontier. Almost all activity was limited to a particular town. Though stagecoaches left daily for Calumet from most of the towns, it was a five- or six-hour ride, and few residents could afford two days off just to spend a little time in “the city.” 

The focus of civic and social life in Central was the Methodist Church, a simple frame structure built in 1869. Any community life that existed was there. The basement served as the Sunday school and the church school library, and the sanctuary--in addition to being used for services--was a general meeting place. Only one place saw more action than the church in old Central, and that was the mine itself. 

• • •

Just what life was like in an essentially isolated mining town, without running water, electricity, or telephones, can best be described by one of its citizens, someone who was there. That’s not as difficult as it sounds, even though the mine officially closed nearly eighty years ago. People at least tried to remain in the region when forced to leave their town, and former residents of Central Mine and their descendants are found all through the Keweenaw. 

Until his death last year at age ninety-five, the senior surviving native of Central Mine was Fred Bryant, who was born there in 1883. He, his mother, two brothers, and two sisters lived in Central until 1894, when the mine first began showing signs of playing out. His father, a miner, had died in a mining accident six months before Fred was born, and his mother cared for her five children by running a small shop, selling candy and making hats for the women in town. In an 1893 listing of town services she was included as “Jane Bryant, milliner.” 

There were a thousand people in Central then; it was still a town with a fighting chance. And in his last years, after he gave up his practice as a dentist, Fred Bryant took great pleasure in reminiscing about those days. Not long before he died he shared some of those memories with me. 

“It was more of a big family than just a town,” he said as we sat in the front room of the house in Laurium which was home for the last fifty-five years of his life. “We were mostly Cornish, but there were others, lots of others, and we all got along. There were no police, and I can’t remember a single incidence of crime·.” 

He sat in a straight-back chair, speaking clearly and distinctly and gesturing with delicate hands that only a few years before had put down a dentist’s tool for the last time. 

Since Dr. Bryant’s wife died in 1958, he had lived alone in the large house on Woodland Avenue, along with the symbols of his earlier years. A big, old Philco radio stood in the corner. The rocking chair he had refinished was against the wall. And over by the front window was the foot-operated drill he had used early in his practice. He took pride in pointing out that the drill still worked. In fact, in that entire house full of things collected throughout his lifetime, it seemed that everything still worked, including the old radio. That was Fred Bryant’s way, to keep things working as long as he could. 

“It was a simple time,” he said, “but there were a lot of good things. I remember all the things that went on at the church. Especially Christmas--the tree and Santa Claus coming down through the ceiling.” 

Christmas was a big event at Central Mine, as it was along that whole series of towns, and Dr. Bryant recalled the ritual to me without hesitation, though his last holiday celebration at the church had been eighty-three years before. 

“They always began at the same time,” he said, “seven-thirty on the last Saturday before Christmas. It was the children’s time, and none of us would miss it. There were all the gifts hung across the room.” 

The gifts were mostly practical things, suspenders and mittens and pocket knives, but also some dolls and horns. They weren’t displayed under the tree but on two long clotheslines strung across the width of the sanctuary about two feet from one another. The heavier toys hung from the bottom line, the lighter from the top. 

The number of children attending this and other church functions reflected the decline in the population at Central Mine. Where Sunday school attendance averaged close to two hundred children in 1886, by 1898 the figure had dropped as low as twelve or thirteen. 

“It was no secret,” said Dr. Bryant. “Everyone knew the end was near, and people began to move out.” 

He put his hand to his new hearing aid as if to adjust it in his ear, then went on. 

“It was sad, but we had no choice. There was just no work. The mine was going, and the mine was everything.” 

The death of Central began in 1894, about the time the Bryant family moved to the mining community of Osceola. By then the population had already dropped below one thousand, and by 1905 it was down to one hundred. In 1909 only a handful were left, and in that year the post office was closed. 

Central did not die easily. Several families stayed on after the mine closed and the bulk of the people had left. Individual miners working through an arrangement with the company tried to keep the mine operating, working it for what they could pull out. Then, briefly, the company reopened the mine, but soon it was closed for good. 

“Many of them went to Detroit,” said Dr. Bryant of his neighbors and friends at Central. “Others moved here and there, different places.” 

His voice dropped off, and he gestured with his hand toward the road, as if he were going to continue. But he sat back in his chair and was quiet. 

• • •

It was well after the mine closed for the last time that Frances Rozich was born. Her grandfather had gone to work at Central soon after the mine opened in 1853, and he had worked as the town caretaker for the company. Later her uncle took the same position, and when he left in 1953 he was the last “official” resident. That was how it usually was, the company paying someone to stay on even after the mine closed to keep watch over the houses and whatever was left of the equipment. 

“I was six when we moved from Central so I could attend school,” Mrs. Rozich told me. That was in 1922, and she remembers going back on weekends to visit her uncle. “There wasn’t much left. I remember walking through the old store and climbing up the bluff to the school. It was wrack and ruin, with some schoolbooks lying around and a few old slates that they used.” 

She paused, thinking a moment, then went on: 

“I remember an old casket in the store, an old-time casket that just didn’t come in time. It was there for the longest time, but I don’t know what ever happened to it.” 

The old coffin has disappeared, as has the store and the school that Frances Rozich remembers. Most of Central is gone now. A few of the houses remain, some deserted and others being used as summer homes. The Methodist Church is there, just as it was then, and each year reunions are held and a guest pastor comes for the services. One service a year, on a Sunday morning in July. 

Except this past summer. There were two services last July 29th, the seventy-third reunion at Central. People came from all over the country. They filled the little church for the 9:00 A.M. service and overflowed onto the lawn for the 11 :00 A.M. service. And at both they dedicated their “new” organ, a ninety-six-year-old Mason and Hamlin, in memory of Fred Bryant. 

The story of Central Mine has been saved by its children and its children’s children who return each year, and by Charles Stetter, whose parents lived there and who still keeps up their house and runs the yearly reunion at the church. But for most of the abandoned towns on the peninsula there is no one to tell what happened and why. Their people are gone, and their stories lost. 

What was once Copper Falls, a community of over five hundred with its own general store, physician, hotel, and even its own photographer, is now a few old houses along a dirt road that runs a couple of hundred yards and then turns into wildflowers. 

Delaware, which in 1880 had a population close to twelve hundred to operate and support its mine, is now a series of little company houses scattered on either side of Highway 41. The foundation of the old boarding house is still there, and a few walls, but none of its three floors. Just a few old houses, boarded up, and an outhouse pushed over on its side. 

And as for Mandan, you would drive right past it if you were not absolutely certain of just where it was. There is the sign on the highway, but the dirt road seems to go nowhere. It’s a turn-off, into a particularly dark, overgrown section of forest, and it appears to end there. But the road comes out of the darkness and into a clearing, and once in the light, pieces of a town can be seen up the hill and to the right, if you look closely. 

Mandan was a copper mining town like the rest, and in 1910 it had over three hundred people. But the mine was, for its size, deep and expensive to operate, and it was soon closed by the Keweenaw Copper Company. They left Frank Bessolo there as the caretaker, but everybody else moved out. In 1928 he left, too. 

Today it has more the look of a classic ghost town than most of the others. As the little road climbs the hill and jogs around to the right, it passes half a dozen or more old houses, windowpanes broken and doors boarded up. Their paint is eaten away, and their porches are caved in, and in the eerie, half-light that comes in through the thick covering of trees it is easy to imagine the sound of miners going off to work and children playing in their yards. But it has to be imagination, for the only inhabitants now are the hordes of black flies and mosquitoes that cloud around every shack and foundation. 

Of course not all the mining towns in upper Michigan have turned into ghost towns. Many have managed to survive, usually because their economy was a little more diverse from the start. Phoenix and Mohawk are not nearly the towns they were seventy-five years ago, but they have hung on. People still live there. The town of Gay has outlasted both the closing of its twin stamp mills in 1932 and its lumber mill in 1966. It goes on, though its population of close to one thousand is down to seventy-five. 

• • •

Largest of the towns hovering in that suspended state between survival and extinction is Quincy. Once it was the home of one of the most productive mines in the area. “Old Reliable,” it was called, and with justification. It operated for thirty-three years and paid a dividend to its stockholders every year from 1867 until 1921, finally ceasing major operation in 1931. 

At its proudest Quincy had over thirteen thousand people, all in some way supporting the operation of the mine. Like many mining companies of the time, the Quincy Mining Company took care of its own. The town had its own school and company store, and its own movie. The dispensary had one doctor and two interns on twenty-four-hour call, and a crew of workers was employed to maintain all buildings, including the miners’ houses. 

Violet Cliff was born and raised on Quincy Hill, and she talked with me about life there when she was a little girl. “It was a wonderful time to be alive, and an exciting place to live. Always something happening. I remember all the trains, and the big searchlight that shined at night. I remember watching the men, hundreds of men, coming back from their shift in the mine. I can still see them heading up toward the Dry, the house where they cleaned up before going home. As a little girl I was told never to look over there, but I did.” 

A semi-retired teacher, Miss Cliff admits only to being “past sixty-five.” There is an English edge to her quick speech, and she follows her own words with her eyes as she talks. She showed me price lists from the time--sirloin steak at twenty-four cents a pound, and rib roast at twenty-two cents; one hundred pounds of flour for three dollars, and English breakfast tea at fifty cents a pound. And she told me about her favorite event of the year, the county fair. 

“My grandfather was up at four o’clock in the morning, getting the vegetables all washed and everything. My mother had rhubarb, citron, and vegetable marrow cakes and almost transparent cookies. At school we all wanted to see which one of our papers would be selected to go to the fair. My dad and I went way down over the fields to the swamps and got black ferns and wildflowers.” 

Her eyes lit up as she talked, her words coming out faster and faster as she jumped from one topic to another before fully finished with the first, rushing to tell me about her family’s preparation for the judging at the fair. 

“I usually won for my wildflowers, and my mother collected blue tickets for her cakes, and grandfather for his vegetables,” she said as if it had all happened last year. 

“Oh, the county fair,” she said. “There’ll never be anything like it. It was a beautiful time. The streetcars so full of people they couldn’t collect fares, running all night to Calumet and Franklin.” 

Her voice trailed off as she described the changes that took place after the Depression. The union came in, she said, and work slowed down about the time prices were going up. Her father got laid off at the very beginning because they said he had only one daughter to support. From then on the decline was steady. The mine was shut in 1931, then opened again in 1937 for three years, closed and then opened again, and finally closed for the last time in 1945. 

“There isn’t much more to tell,” she said. “Everything just stopped, and the people went away.” 

• • •

Now there are less than seven hundred people on Quincy Hill, living in houses the company built for its miners, its engineers, and maintenance people during the second half of the nineteenth century. Mostly the blocks are deserted, the carefully laid-out pattern of streets forming a city of foundations. Here and there, at the end of a row of basements, is a cluster of houses. A tiny colony of two-story houses, and then more empty blocks. Whatever its physical characteristics before, now it is just another town living in its own past. And they are all alike. From Mandan and Quincy to Pompeii and the Roman Forum, to walk through them is to visit the bones of a civilization. Where once people thrived, only trees and flowers grow. Where there were voices raised in laughter, now there is the wind. 

If there is a future for this land of the past it is in the tourist trade which comes to enjoy its miles of lakefront. But positive as that force might be, its presence can be jarring. 

From 1920 to 1931 the Quincy Mining Company operated the largest steam-powered hoist in the world, a 790-ton monster that hauled copper ore from a depth of 9,260 feet below the surface. The hoist doesn’t run anymore, but they’ve cleaned it up and painted it and set up displays around it, and for a dollar you can examine it. Somehow it seems strange, all bright and pretty amidst the crumbling buildings and dismembered sections of railroad track. 

And there is more. Across the hill from the huge barn that houses the hoist is the old brick building where four of the company’s steam locomotives once received constant care and attention. Until recently they had remained in their own crypt, the dilapidated structure a fit setting. With the door half-ajar and the roof rotting and porous, isolated shafts of light pierced the darkness of an age forgotten, revealing the four magnificent engines, all lined up, waiting for an engineer and a fireman who would never come again. But old trains are an attraction, a marketable commodity, and from this and other time capsules on Quincy Hill they have been hauled out into the sun, no longer working machines in suspended animation but hulking oddities for the delight of tourists. 

Violet Cliff, who still lives in the same house on the hill her family has owned for eighty-five years, says she misses the excitement of life on Quincy Hill, but she doesn’t remember many of the people who lived there. She doesn’t mind at all that they have turned the hoist into a tourist attraction, and she has never seen the house with the locomotives. But she knows her prize garden has gone to weed, that she can’t get her house painted or anyone to keep her 1937 Ford coupe running right. 

“It’s all changed,” she confided in me, “and no one seems to care.” 

She is, in many ways, symbolic of the area—tough and sweet and pretty, with a tenacious link to the past. 

Violet Cliff was happier in 1915. So was Quincy Hill, and a lot of other towns whose place in time has passed.