Hurley: Hell-Hole of the Gogebic Range

Hurley, Wisconsin was born out of iron ore in the eighteen eighties, when rich deposits along the Gogebic Range drew underground miners to one of the most isolated corners of the Upper Midwest. The miners needed somewhere to spend their pay, and Silver Street was there to help. Throughout the Midwest, wherever lumberjacks and miners gathered, Hurley was spoken of as the roughest town on the range.

During Prohibition, the town never much bothered with the formality of stopping. Speakeasies, brothels, and gambling dens lined Silver Street openly enough that a federal investigator in nineteen twenty-nine named Hurley the worst community in Wisconsin, saying gambling, prostitution, bootlegging, and drugs were about the chief occupations of the place. Chicago mobsters treated Hurley as a reliable place to relax outside the city.

The iron mines closed by nineteen sixty-five, but Silver Street's reputation has outlasted the ore.