Quincy Mine

A Houghton-Hancock landmark visible from miles around, the Quincy Hoist hauled copper from over a mile deep. The 726 million pounds of copper it yielded from 1856 to 1925 kept the area prosperous for decades.

The U.P.'s best all-around underground mine tour is at the Quincy Copper Mine on Quincy Hill above Hancock, right off U.S. 41. The tour is in three parts. There's a surface tour of a huge steam hoist, a shaft house, and extensive mineral and historical exhibits. Visitors can also take a scenic tram ride, and, if they choose, enter the underground mine, for a tour of two hours.

The Quincy tour with perspective on the area's geology and copper-mining technology. (Quincy's technology was cutting-edge in its day.) Tour guides are enthusiastic, knowledgeable Michigan Tech students, retired miners, and others interested in mining. They are happy to field questions at all levels. Techies of all ages really enjoy the tour. When the Seaman Mineral Museum eventually moves into the Quincy machine house, next to the tour center, Quincy Hill will pair one of the U.S.'s top mineral museums with an outstanding mining site.

To get to the mine entrance for the UNDERGROUND TOUR, a tram takes visitors down a steep hill. It offers a panoramic view of the Lift Bridge and downtown Houghton. (This is the Midwest's only cog-wheel tram, like that on Mount Washington in New Hampshire.) Once four tramways transported copper ore from mines on Quincy Hill down to the smelter at Ripley on the Portage Waterway.

Visitors don hard hats and raincoats and board a fat-tired train (level this time) taking them through a horizontal mine tunnel (called an "adit"). They enter the mine's drippy environment, always a chilly 40° at this, the seventh level of what was Shaft No. 5. (At deeper levels, temperatures became uncomfortably warm.) Rock has been bolted for safety. (When in full swing, Copper Country mines lost a man a week due to rock falls and cave-ins.)

Visitors enter a dramatic high, scaffolded "stope," the enlarged rock diggings where copper deposits had been found. Its "ceiling" slants at a 54-degree angle, the angle of the lava flow in this particular place. It's the same angle as the shaft house's incline and the angle of the long shafts through which miners were transported by rail into the copper-bearing basalt rock of the Pewabic Lode here. This 1% to 5% copper-bearing rock was hoisted up to the surface to be crushed and processed, eventually yielding pure copper ingots

Visitors see traces of copper and other minerals in the mine. Bats are mostly huddled together, seldom in flight. There's the moment when the tour guide turns off the lights to show how little light miners had to work in back around 1850, when miners had to buy their own candles and three miners shared one candle.

The mine's industrial showpiece is the giant, 60-foot-high NORDBERG STEAM HOIST, a drum holding 13,200 feet of cable used to hoist ore from the mines. The largest-ever steam-powered hoist, it came on line in 1920, near the end of the era of Keweenaw copper, when the Quincy Mine had to go deeper and deeper for copper. When the hoist was installed, Quincy No. 2 was already over a mile deep. Mine managers hoped that a much deeper shaft would be dug.

But its copper deposits had become increasingly low-grade. Worldwide competition soon made it too expensive to extract. The Quincy Mine closed in 1931 and reopened temporarily during World War Two. Of its 92 levels, groundwater has flooded them up to the eleventh level.

Don't miss the self-guided exhibit in the No. 2 SHAFT HOUSE itself, across from the gift shop. The hoist was designed to haul up a five-ton skip loaded with ten tons of ore at a speed of 36 mph from a depth of almost two miles. An informative six-minute film shows work in the mine, starting with poignant glimpses of the men as they take their seats in the man cars to be plunged to a dark, hot, and dangerous workplace. Until 1913, miners worked 12-hour shifts — 8-hour shifts after that. When the mine reached the 92nd level in depth, in its final years, the heat reached 100 degrees.

At the beginning and end of each shift, carrying 30 men each replaced the rock skips and took workers down into and out of the mines. This happened at each shaft house, where the pulley cable came from the hoist house to raise and lower cars into the mine.

TheGIFT SHOP in the mine's onetime supplies building has an excellent selection of books and DVDs on mining, copper, minerals, and local history; mineral specimens; jewelry; and copper items. It's an important income stream for this extensive nonprofit operation. The gift house parking area is a good place to see the Aurora Borealis close to town with a big, unobstructed sky.

TheQUINCY MINE'S GROUNDS are an overlooked attraction, open at any time, and especially interesting to photographers. The volunteer Quincy Mine Hoist Association inherited the core of the mine complex and purchased additional land as a visual buffer. Thus much of Quincy Hill retains the eerie, poetic look of a mostly abandoned industrial site, rather than having new buildings and contemporary signage press in around it. (The Keweenaw National Historic Park fought to keep the Quincy Hill water tower black, instead of a proposed red and white paint job commemorating the Hancock High Bulldogs.) Many mine buildings have become ruins, walls of mine rock trimmed with sandstone or brick, making picturesque, shifting compositions from different viewpoints. The ruins stand out most dramatically in early December, when a light dusting of snow makes the walls pop out in contrast.

Behind the No. 2 shaft house are skips for hauling rock, and dewatering cars. South (downhill) from the shaft house are ruined walls, mostly of boiler houses from earlier eras. Downhill from them are sagging open-topped wood ore cars, and then the railroad roundhouse. The ore cars carried copper ore from the shaft houses down to the mill in Mason on Torch Lake. There ore was broken down to concentrate, then taken to the Ripley smelter to be turned into pure copper ingots. Many ruined buildings have actually been stabilized, but it's not a good idea to enter them. Footing is uneven throughout the grounds.

Typically, when mines closed down, the shaft houses, hoist machinery, and other machines would have been sold for scrap. But Parsons Todd, the Quincy Mining Company's preservation-minded president for most of the 20th century, wanted to keep two mine shaft houses as landmarks. (The memorable, many-gabled No. 6 Shaft House burned in 1956.) Todd had been the one who had the big hoist house designed rather elegantly, with a stripped-down Georgian Revival look. He decided to keep the hoist, believing that steam power might come back. His father, also named Parsons Todd, was responsible for starting the tradition of careful rock masonry in the mine's utilitarian buildings.

For info on other Upper Peninsula mine tours, see Delaware Mine under Copper Harbor, Adventure Mine under Greenland, Iron Mountain Iron Mine under Norway, and Cliffs Shaft Iron Mine under Ishpeming, plus tours of the active Tilden and Empire mines outside Ishpeming.

Located 1 mile north of Hancock on U.S. 41. (906) 482-3101. Visit quincymine.com for more info. Season: from early May through Oct. Call for info on Dec. tours Thurs-Sat. More walking, winter footgear required. From early May into early June open Fri-Sun 9:30-5. Continuous tours through the day, last tour at 5. Summer hours daily 9:30 to 5. Call for spring and fall hours. Group rates when reserved ahead. Allow 2 hours for full tour. Bring a sweater or sweater for underground. Rates for full tour: adults $15 (full tour), $12 (surface and tram), $9.50 surface. Children 6-12 $8 (full tour), $5 (surface and tram), $4.50 (surface). Ages 5 and under free. Military, senior, AAA discounts. Handicap access: call.