Gitche Gumee Agate & History Museum

Gitche Gumee Agate and History Museum

Datolite is a mineral in the Silicates group. Like agate, which is in the Oxides group, Datolite forms in veins and cavities in basaltic igneous rocks.

This modest frame house is the headquarters of the ever-expanding agate business of Karen Brzys (rhymes with "whiz"). The gift shop is full of her agate art. She markets her mineral art at some 20 mineral shows, and shows it on her agatelady.com web site. (The web page also has interesting Grand Marais history.) Karen's lavishly illustrated book, Agates Inside Out ($23), is on hand. It "makes you think like an agate to be more successful in finding them." Duluth photographer Tom Scherer has developed "never-before techniques for photographing agates from around the world.
The museum also offers summer science camp classes for kids.
Depending on Karen's schedule, visitors might register ahead for agate classes tailored to their interests, from classes at the museum to agate-collecting trips in remote areas. "One of the museum's important missions," says Karen, "is to educate people about agates." During July and August fund-raising lectures are presented in the hall behind the museum, Monday through Saturday at 6:55 p.m. Call to confirm.

The museum also offers summer science camp classes for kids. If time permits, Karen will show her "wowser" rocks to interested visitors. Karen's agate enterprises have grown because of repeat visitors and mentions in National Geographic Traveler, Traverse Magazine, NPR, and elsewhere. It's not quite the laid-back place of times past, since more and more people are hunting agates as a hobby.

In the 1950s and 1960s, during all the summers Karen had spent in Grand Marais as a child visiting her grandparents, what she loved the most was dropping in on retired fisherman Axel Niemi and his Gitche Gumee Agate Museum right here, across the street from Woodland Park campground. The museum lay closed for years, but in 1998 Karen was thrilled to have a chance to buy it. She feels it is a privilege to carry on Axel's legacy.

Karen had loved looking for agates and learning about them. She also loved Axel's stories, about how, in 1910, when the Alger & Smith lumber company finished cutting down the trees, the last thing they took with them was the railroad tracks connecting Grand Marais to the outside world. He told about how the stranded residents who decided to stay (largely Finlanders) built self-sufficient lives here, living off the land and water, using their ingenuity, thrift, and a good measure of sisu, that Finnish quality of toughness and endurance. (The lumber company had given settlers some cutover land.) A road to Seney was not constructed until 1919.

The Niemi family built three fishing tugs over the years to make a living off the lake, while raising most of their own food to feed their family of six children. Axel Niemi's dad sold his fish tug in 1953 and then started the Agate Museum as a sideline to his job managing the Woodland Park campground. Karen, from metro Detroit, was among the kids who were fascinated with his stories, his music, his puppet Nutty Buddy, and his knowledge of rocks and minerals.

In 1994 Karen moved to Grand Marais and became involved in a brewpub. After buying the museum, Karen acquired Axel's boxes of Grand Marais artifacts and enough original furniture to expand the museum to have historical displays about logging, fishing, Grand Marais, and the Niemi family. She tracked down the handmade Shark, the Niemis' last fishing tug, deteriorating in a field near the South Haven Maritime Museum. She was given the tug, but the cost of transporting it to Grand Marais was considerable. The Shark is now outside the museum. Ask Karen about its thoughtful design details.

Karen reopened Axel's museum in 1999. It's about Lake Superior minerals (fluorescents, copper, and more) and agates. The museum is also about history and how people made a self-sufficient life in Grand Marais with very little cash. They grew and processed food, made clothes on knitting machines, fished, gathered blueberries. Axel used a pig boiler to steam-bend wood for the Shark. "If kids can tell a fact they learned about history," Karen says, "they get a rock."

E21739 Braziel St., opposite the entrance to Woodland Park. Take H-77/Lake St. through downtown, turn left/west onto Braziel. (906) 494-2590 (office), (906) 494-3000 (museum). From mid May thru June and in Sept open Sun thru Fri 2-5, Sat noon-7 and by appt. In July & August open Mon thru Sat from noon to 7, Sun possibly 2-5 or by appt. $1 admission to museum for adults. Gift shop free. Handicap access: call.
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