As I mentioned yesterday, we spent the good part of our morning in Houghton, MI waiting for our mine tour to start. There are probably dozens of places you can visit in the Keweenaw Peninsula of Michigan to walk through an old copper mine, but we picked The Quincy Mine Hoist Association.

You also might recall from yesterday, that when it was almost time for our tour to start we crossed the bridge and found ourselves in Hancock, MI.

The roads in Houghton and Hancock are pretty special to put it mildly. Due to the fact that the cities are built on the sides of hills, there are some very steep roads. There were times I wasn't sure my truck was going to make it up and the active hill assist mode even came on a couple of times. Add to that the fact that these communities can get literally feet of snow in the Winter then you might be able to imagine how exciting driving can be.

I am actually glad we decided to do the Quincy Mine tour. It was rather expensive at $40 per person, but the company is a non profit and the fees they charge are one of the only ways they can keep the tours running. In addition to that, it gave us the chance to see the largest steam hoist ever built.

The tour was a two to three hour event, so we definitely got our money's worth. Plus we got to wear hard hats!

The tour started down at the Steam Hoist building which is where we took the opening picture at. Through the window in the background you can see the mine shaft that the hoist used to pull the copper ore out by the hundreds of tons.

Just another picture of the shaft house.

We got really luck and our tour guide was actually the director of operations for the Hoist Association or something like that. You could tell he was really proud of what they are trying to preserve here and not just a kid that had memorized a script.

He wasn't quite old enough to have been alive back when the mine was in operation (late 1800's early 1900's) but he talked about it like an older person does when they are remembering something from their past.

As I mentioned before, the hoist was powered by a steam engine and the drum you see in the pictures wound up a cable that was probably the diameter of my forearm. Check out this blurb from Wikipedia

When the mine ceased production in 1945, the Quincy Number 2 shaft was the world's longest mine shaft, at 9,260 feet (2.82 km or 1.75 miles) along the dip of the deposit on a 55 degree decline.[12][13] (measured vertically from the shaft collar, the depth is 6,200 feet.)[14] To raise and lower ore and workers into this shaft, the world's largest steam-driven mine hoist was built in 1918 and housed in the Quincy Number 2 Hoist House. The Nordberg Steam Hoist and its reinforced concrete building, built in the Georgian architectural style with brick veneer and Italian-tiled walls, cost over $370,000 in 1918 but was used for only eleven years until it ceased usage in 1929.[15] Weighing more than 880 tons, it lifted 10 tons of ore at 36.4 miles per hour, thus saving $16,080 in fuel bills in its first year of operation.[16] The hoist sat on the largest concrete slab ever poured, containing 3200 cu. yards of concrete and over 8 tons of reinforcement material.[17] The Number 2 Hoist House was built as a reinforced concrete structure on a scale rare for 1918, making it one of the first of its kind.[18] The very decorative Hoist House was used as a showpiece for visiting investors.

I can verify much of what is written above falls in line with what the tour guide tells us, so this is one of those cases where you can actually believe what you read on the Internet. The concrete building was massive and it is no surprise to me that it cost as much as it did to pour back then.

The tour guide said they spared no expense with the building even putting in special glass from overseas to refract the sunlight to keep the temperatures down in the building etc.

There was a single man who worked on the upper platform controlling the hoist. The other workers tasked with cleaning and oiling the steam engines were not allowed to talk to or disturb the hoist operator in any way.

With tons of copper and (probably less importantly back then) men's lives at stake, one distraction could mean total disaster. They used a series of bells to relay messages from down in the shaft to the hoist operator.

Eventually, it was upgraded to radio lines.

This post is getting long, so I am going to cut it short here. I will cover the rest of our Quincy Mine Hoist tour next week.

I do want to mention that the copper boom in the Keweenaw Peninsula of Michigan brought people from all over the world back in the 1800's and 1900's. This can be evidenced by many of the similar town names that many of you may be familiar with in Europe.

Additionally, we can thank the Cornish miners (who were/are some of the best in the world the guide said) for the delectable item we call a Pasty. I will write more about that in a future post.

What started as wooden ladders down a hand dug shaft boomed into the marvel of engineering (for that time) that you have seen in the pictures above.

All pictures taken by Hive account@mrsbozz and I.