Negaunee: Pioneer of the Iron Range

The name Negaunee comes from an Ojibwe word meaning pioneer. The people who first settled this place chose that name deliberately, and it fit. This small city in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan was the first place in the United States where iron ore from the Lake Superior region was commercially mined, and the men who came here in the eighteen forties were pioneers in the truest sense, entering a wilderness with no roads, no shelter, and no certainty that they would survive the winters.

The story started on September nineteenth, eighteen forty-four, when a federal surveyor named William Austin Burt was working his way through the forests northwest of here and noticed something strange. His magnetic compass refused to hold a reading. The needle swung wildly, pointing in different directions as his party moved through the trees. He eventually traced the disturbance to an enormous outcropping of iron ore, one of the richest deposits in North America. Native Americans who knew the territory had long been aware of the iron-heavy ground. They led the surveyors to the most concentrated deposits.

Investors from Jackson, Michigan arrived the following spring, established the Jackson Mine, and began trying to get ore out of the ground. By eighteen forty-eight, iron was being smelted at the Carp River Forge a few miles away. By the eighteen fifties, a railroad had been built to carry ore down to the harbor at Marquette, where steamships could take it east through the Great Lakes to the steel mills of Ohio and Pennsylvania.

From roughly eighteen eighty to nineteen hundred, the Marquette Range, centered on Negaunee and its neighboring town of Ishpeming, was the leading iron ore producing region in the United States. The rise of Minnesota's Mesabi Range eventually shifted dominance westward. Negaunee's population peaked in the early twentieth century and has declined since, as mining mechanized and needed fewer workers. But the city remains, stubborn and proud, on the edge of the iron country it pioneered.