Ashland: Brownstone and Iron on Chequamegon Bay
Near Bayfield, Wisconsin
Ashland sits on Chequamegon Bay at the southwestern corner of Lake Superior, and for several decades at the end of the eighteen hundreds it was one of the busiest small ports on the Great Lakes. Two commodities drove that boom. Iron ore came south from the Gogebic Range after the railroad reached Ashland in eighteen seventy-seven, and brownstone came off the Apostle Islands and nearby quarries to be shipped to Chicago and Milwaukee and a dozen other cities hungry for the dark reddish-brown sandstone that was the fashionable building material of the Gilded Age.
The Prentice Brownstone Company alone supplied building stone to cities across the Midwest. Ashland's own downtown went up in that same stone during the boom years. Then iron prices fell, the taste for brownstone passed, and Ashland's waterfront quieted.
The ore dock is gone and the brownstone quarries are quiet, but the old downtown on the ridge above the bay is still there, those Gilded Age facades cut from the same stone that built half of Chicago.
