Until the year , the Michigan Territory had ownership over the eastern section of the Upper Peninsula the yellow region in the graphic above. The territory then expanded to include the rest of the Upper Peninsula, the entire State of Wisconsin and other parts of the Midwest.
Due to a financial crisis the Michigan Territory was under pressure from Congress and President Andrew Jackson, at which point the Michigan Territory accepted a resolution from the government. Before signing, Michigan rejected the offer partly out of pride, at the time feeling that the Upper Peninsula was a worthless region with nothing more than wilderness.
Michigan accepted the terms on that fateful December day in Ann Arbor. Hundreds of large and small waterfalls and springs splash down the cliffs, reacting with minerals in the sandstone to create a palette of colors, including browns and reds from iron, blues and greens from copper, and black from manganese.
The fragility of this natural wonder is apparent: large fragments from recently collapsed cliffs lie at the base of rock faces. In some places, the cliffs may retreat several feet in a single year. Eaten away by pounding waves, the lower portions are the first to go. This is copper mining country. During the Civil War, the port was a major loading dock for copper ore. In the century that followed, the peninsula drew vacationing families to holiday houses, many along the southeastern coast of Keweenaw Bay.
Some of the beaches were created from massive amounts of gravel and sand excavated during removal of copper ore from underground mines. Established in midway up the Keweenaw Peninsula, the Quincy mine grew into one of the largest and most profitable underground copper mines in the country, earning the nickname Old Reliable—until its lodes declined in purity in the early s. Today, guided tours transport visitors on a cart pulled by tractor to a depth of only feet.
Below, the mine has filled with water. After each blow, the miner grasping the rod rotated it 90 degrees. At the end of a ten-hour workday, four holes would have been driven into the rock. Sixteen holes filled with dynamite formed a blast pattern that loosened a chunk of copper ore to be transported to the surface. The backbreaking work was done by the light of a single candle. With a twinge of guilt, I return to my comfortable lodgings, the Laurium Manor Inn, a restored Victorian mansion that once belonged to mine owner Thomas H.
Hoatson Jr. From my balcony I can see small-town Americana. Girls play hopscotch on the sidewalk. Young men hunch over the open hood of a Chevy Camaro, scrub the tires and wax the exterior. A songbird chorus rises from the stately oaks, hemlocks and maples shading large houses, many dating back more than a century. They abandoned careers in Silicon Valley in to transform this once-derelict mansion into an upscale bed-and-breakfast in tiny Laurium pop.
Work on the stained glass, reupholstered furniture, carpentry, original plumbing and lighting fixtures has stretched out for 20 years.
Some miles to the east, the town of Marquette offers a remarkable inventory of historical architecture, linked to another 19th-century mining boom—in iron ore. The single most striking structure is the now abandoned Lower Harbor Ore Dock, jutting feet into Lake Superior from downtown Marquette. Here, loads of iron pellets are transferred from ore trains to cargo vessels.
From about , iron-mining wealth funded many handsome buildings built of locally quarried red sandstone. The Marquette County Courthouse, built in , is where many of the scenes in the courthouse cliffhanger, Anatomy of a Murder , were filmed. The movie, starring James Stewart, Lee Remick and Ben Gazzara, was adapted from the novel of the same title by Robert Traver, the pseudonym of John Voelker, who was the defense attorney in the rape and vengeance murder case on which the book was based.
Benjamin and his sons, One Stickney and Two Stickney you can't make this up , resisted and stabbed the sheriff. He survived his wounds, and it was enough to prompt both sides to withdrawn from the No Man's Land. The political scuffle went on until when a deal was reached. Michigan would gain statehood and give up the Toledo Strip, but gain the upper peninsula from the Northwest Territory. Ohio considered it a victory. That is until people learned about the mountains stuffed full of copper and iron ore in the upper peninsula.
Sounds like Michigan got the better end of the deal. In the summer of , as the Toledo War was ending and Michigan was gaining its statehood, the Wisconsin territory was officially formed. Wisconsin was, at one point, part of Michigan territory but broke off before it ever had its own name on the upper peninsula. Thus, we never had it. But, if Ohio had just kept to itself and accepted the loss of the Toledo Strip, Michigan would have likely left the upper peninsula for Wisconsin.
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