Quincy Mine

The Keweenaw holds a kind of copper found almost nowhere else on earth in such purity, native copper you can pick up and shape without smelting. This is Anishinaabe country, the homeland of the Ojibwe, part of the Three Fires Confederacy of the Ojibwe, Odawa, and Potawatomi. For thousands of years Native peoples mined this copper from surface pits and worked it into tools, ornaments, and trade goods that traveled across much of North America.

The Keweenaw Bay Indian Community and other Ojibwe continue to live in and steward this region. When American mining companies arrived in the 1840s, they were following veins that had been known and worked for millennia, though on a scale that would transform the land and draw immigrants from across Europe to the remote peninsula.

The Quincy Mining Company began operations in the mid-1800s and soon earned its nickname, Old Reliable, for paying dividends to shareholders year after year through good times and bad. As the richest rock near the surface was worked out, the miners followed the copper deeper, extending the main shaft to more than a mile and a half of angled depth by the early twentieth century.

The work drew a diverse immigrant workforce, Cornish, Finnish, Italian, and many others, who built the towns of Hancock and Houghton and gave Copper Country an enduring cultural stamp. Mining here wound down in the middle of the twentieth century, undercut by cheaper copper elsewhere and the sheer cost of hauling ore up from such depths, and the mines fell quiet after more than a century of work.

Quincy's most astonishing artifact is its hoist. Housed in a tall building on the hill, the Nordberg steam hoist was, when it was built, the largest such hoist in the world, a machine designed to raise loaded cars from thousands of feet below at high speed. Standing beside its massive drum and gearing, you get a sense of the scale of engineering the deep mines demanded.

A visit today can include a ride on a cog tram down the steep hillside to a mine adit, where you walk into a level of the underground workings. Inside, the air is cool and damp year-round, the rock glinting faintly with mineral, and guides explain how the miners drilled, blasted, and hauled the copper out by hand and by machine.

Summer and early fall are the prime seasons to visit, when the surface buildings and underground tours run on their fullest schedules and the Keweenaw's forests and Lake Superior shoreline are at their best. Fall color across the peninsula is superb, and the hilltop views over the Portage waterway are worth the climb.

Winter here is legendary. The Keweenaw is one of the snowiest places in the country, buried under snowfall that draws skiers and snowmobilers, and much of the mine's tour operation pauses in the cold months. Even so, the red hoist house standing above a white-blanketed Hancock is a striking sight in the deep of winter.

The closest Boutel™ stays, so you can turn this stop into an overnight. Each is an independently owned, editorially selected place to stay.