The Copper That Wired America

Long before the Calumet and Hecla Mining Company arrived in the Keweenaw Peninsula in the eighteen forties, the Anishinaabek were harvesting copper from this land. They had been doing it for more than seven thousand years. The copper veins that surface here are among the purest native copper deposits on earth, requiring almost no smelting, workable with stone tools. The Anishinaabek traded that copper across a continent-wide exchange network that reached the Gulf Coast and the Atlantic seaboard.

The industrial-era copper rush began in eighteen forty-one. Within two decades, the Keweenaw Peninsula was producing more copper than any other source in the world. At the peak of production around nineteen ten, the region supplied roughly half of all copper mined in the United States. That copper went into the electrical infrastructure of a modernizing country: telegraph lines, telephone cables, the wiring of factories and homes. The world that ran on electricity ran partly on copper from this narrow peninsula in Lake Superior.

The mines depended on immigrant labor in waves: Cornish miners who came from the tin mines of Cornwall with hard-rock drilling techniques and a culture of mine safety they had paid for with generations of underground deaths; Finnish immigrants who became the largest ethnic group in several Keweenaw counties; Italian and Slovenian workers who arrived later and settled in distinct neighborhoods within the mining towns. The companies owned the housing, the stores, and the churches in many of those towns.

When the deposits became uneconomical to mine in the nineteen twenties, the companies left. The infrastructure they had built, the housing, the civic buildings, the churches, remained. The communities that had built their lives around the copper economy remained. The copper did not.