Michigan Tech: Born in a Fire Hall, Built on Copper

On September fifteenth, eighteen eighty-six, twenty-three students climbed to the second floor of the Houghton Fire Hall and attended the first classes of what would become Michigan Technological University. They had no laboratory, no proper classroom, and almost no equipment. What they had was a mission: to learn the science and engineering of mining copper.

The copper industry of Michigan's Upper Peninsula was, in the eighteen eighties, one of the most important industrial enterprises in the country. The Keweenaw Peninsula had been producing copper since the early eighteen forties, and by the time the Michigan Mining School was established in eighteen eighty-five, the region's mines were supplying a significant share of the world's copper. But the industry lacked trained engineers, people who understood the geology, the mechanics, and the mathematics of getting ore out of the ground efficiently and safely.

The Michigan Legislature created the school at the urging of Congressman Jay Abel Hubbell, who donated land for the first permanent buildings. The school started in the fire hall because those buildings weren't ready yet. Four faculty members taught the initial curriculum, which was intensely practical. Students were expected to go underground. They were expected to get their hands dirty.

The school's name changed multiple times as its mission broadened. Michigan Mining School became Michigan College of Mines in eighteen ninety-seven, then Michigan College of Mining and Technology in nineteen twenty-seven, and finally Michigan Technological University in nineteen sixty-four, reflecting a curriculum that had grown well beyond copper extraction into electrical engineering, computer science, and environmental studies.

The copper that built this region has run out. The last major Keweenaw copper mine closed in nineteen sixty-eight. But the university remained, becoming a research institution of national standing, recruiting students from across the country to study engineering and technology in a remote peninsula at the tip of Michigan that most Americans couldn't find on a map.