The special relationship between copper and people across the Superior region
dates back at least 7,000 years because geology made it easy. Ordinarily underground, around the lake and
significantly along the Keweenaw fault, this easily worked metal was found on
or just under the ground; casually discovered, easily accessed and put to handy
use.
Many of our most famous historic mines were founded on prehistoric pits
and those were first dug using tools
of stone often lashed with hide to wood.
By the middle 1800’s, much of the Upper Peninsula was being stripped of
its great forests. Turn of the century, what the lumbermen left fell to
the service of folk that moved in after. Notable were miners, who needed wood not
only to fuel the fires of industry but to warm hearth & home.
Before long, this same landscape that today again nurtures wilderness resembled post-nuclear
catastrophe. But at the time, it looked only like progress.
During the great copper era of the 19th Century, dozens of working
mines dotted the region and if you add the wildcatters and unnamed
speculations, the number climbs exponentially from there. Despite the tens of millions
of 1880’s dollars invested and the mountains of material hauled from the ground
through the heroic labor laid down by thousands of mostly immigrant miners, only a rare
handful of these operations ever sustained any profit at all.
That brings us to Nonesuch.
Image
used courtesy of the Michigan Department of Natural Resources
Located at the southeast corner of the Porcupine Mountains Wilderness
State Park, Nonesuch operated in fits and starts under five different owners roughly
from 1867 to 1912. Its prime years were 1879-1881, when the mine is said to
have returned a profit, however marginal.
The town built to support the mine peaked at perhaps 300 souls. Though
little is known of cultural life specific to Nonesuch, there was a school, a
boarding house, stores, a stagecoach stop and other trappings typical to a small company town. Still, life for the workers and their families was hard and not just by
modern standards.
Nonesuch lost its post office in 1887, when the machinery at
the mine was disassembled and shipped away to other, more promising sites. While
some folk stayed on and though the Calumet & Hecla Mining Company later threw near 200 tons of equipment at the mine to try again, it was all downhill from
there.
The
town of Nonesuch as it appears today
When I first went in to Nonesuch, the site was privately owned but
thoroughly abandoned. A friend said: “Watch for the sharp turn in the South
Boundary Road. There’s short gravel to park on, behind the trees. Walk the old
road in, then when the trail hangs a left, turn right and go down the hill. Keep your eyes open.”
Our eyes were soon
wide open, because what litters that steep hill blanketed with dense forest are
sights like this:
Huge dark stones mortared into thick, towering walls rise through
obscurity in a wilderness that’s worked for more than 100 years to reclaim
those stones for its own.
It’s hard to overstate the case for how special this place is. Walking that
trail down that hill to catch first sight of the ruins of the Nonesuch mine is akin to being caught unawares by remnants of a great race of builders, with
only mysterious works of stone as evidence of their existence.
The problem at Nonesuch was that unlike most of the rest of the
Keweenaw where copper was found in thick veins or even in boulders on the
surface, this commodity was particularly fine and all but inseparable from
within a bed of sandstone and underlying shale. The customary method of
separating copper from poor rock in a stamp mill failed at Nonesuch.
But where
there’s a resource to be tapped, human ingenuity is brought full to bear.
During the 1880’s the Nonesuch Syndicate engaged in a radical process
to recover the copper by dissolving the host rock in harsh chemicals, to cull
the metal from the waste. Though the process later went on to great success,
this first attempt failed.
Evidence
remains of the chemical leaching process tried at Nonesuch
In the ‘Copper Handbook of 1902', Horace Stevens wrote of Nonesuch:
“Discovered in 1865, the mine was first opened in 1867, since which
time it has swallowed several large fortunes, and has yielded the insignificant
amount of 180 tons 1,072 pounds of refined copper from one of the richest beds
of copper-bearing rock ever opened.
“The copper is there -- millions and millions of pounds of it, not
worth a penny a ton in the mine. Someday the problem will be solved and a new
crop of millionaires made from Nonesuch.”
And that, as they say, was that. I suppose those millions and millions
of pounds of copper are still there. For certain, no new crop of millionaires
has been made from it.
Today Nonesuch is
protected by the Michigan DNR and the Keweenaw National Historic Park, which
combined efforts help protect the last vestiges of regional cultural heritage
before those are swallowed by time made harsher through abandonment and neglect.
There’s never been a complete archeological survey taken at Nonesuch. Consider
please, that the removal of artifacts at this or any historical site is the
destruction of knowledge. Not merely a
crime by law, it’s a crime against our living cultural heritage.
So when you visit Nonesuch, be content to stand in awe of
what the industry of our forebears left in their stead and of how the
wilderness reclaims it now, right before your eyes. Sit quietly beside those sentinel
walls amidst towering trees. Try to imagine what the place was like at its
height -- the stench of caustic chemicals in the air, the sounds of axmen
making constant fuel from dwindling timber, the persistent pounding of the
stamp mill shaking the hill upon which it’s still perched and everywhere the
sweat of labor and lives spent to little or no profitable end.
But most of all, listen for the voices of children. Life at
Nonesuch wasn’t unrelieved, especially for them. 125 years ago, children ran
this hill between these stone walls and down by the river the air rang with laughter.
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