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HOUGHTON
POINTS
OF
INTEREST
A.E. Seaman Mineral Museum. One of the country's finest collections of U.P., Michigan, and world-wide minerals, artfully displayed and interpreted by professional geologists. ...
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Michigan Technological University. One of the country's major technological universities provides a dramatic entryway to Hougton and lots of exceptional winter activities. Ice sculptures for the MTU Winter Carnival are worth a trip! ...
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MTU Archives/Copper Country Historical Collection. Lots of interesting old photos and loads of historical documents from a fascinating region ...
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Downtown Houghton. Shops, eateries, historic saloons, and a brewpub line Shelden Ave., with its handsome sandstone buildings and a dramatic location a block uphill from the Portage Waterway path and Bridgeview Park. ...
more
Keweenaw Gem & Gift. Gemologist and geologist owners provide expert perspective on Copper Country rockhounding, agates, copper, greenstones, datolite, and more. ...
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A.E. Seaman Mineral Museum
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Mineral collectors, artists, and many tourists will be dazzled by the sumptuous patterns and colors of this very large, artfully displayed collection of minerals from around the world. The collection, one of North America's best, developed as an educational tool of Michigan Tech's geology department. Historically, geology had been a key component of this onetime mining college. In 1990 an act of the state legislature made the Seaman Museum the official mineralogical museum of Michigan.
The museum has become generally understandable by anyone with a high school education, thanks to dedicated work interpreting exhibits by museum curator and mineralogy professor George Robinson and his wife, Susan. (She is well known for her realistic paintings of Lake Superior beach stones.)
Of great interest to confirmed rockhounds is the museum's outstanding systematic collection of world minerals. Kids who like rocks should definitely check out familiar, eye-catching quartz and other silicates. Composed of silicon and oxygen, the most abundant elements in the earth's crust, they are the most plentiful and easily collected minerals.
Current popular highlights of the Seaman Museum's extensive collection include:
* the world's finest collection of specimens from the mineral-rich Keweenaw Peninsula
* dramatically illuminated fluorescent minerals under black light. (Be sure to press the button to make them light up.)
* the Lake Superior gemstones exhibit which includes datolites, Thompsonites, agates, and greenstones.
* specimens and memorabilia from the Paris Exposition of 1900, contributed by the geology department of the then-fledgling college.
* the Michigan Mineralogy section featuring some of the state's most spectacular specimens, including native copper and rare naturally occurring silver crystals from the nearby Kearsarge Lode.
Color-coded backgrounds indicate Keweenaw copper (blue green), the iron districts (mauve), and the interesting array of industrial minerals quarried in Lower Michigan and the Eastern Upper Peninsula (gray), all explained in terms of geology, economic use, and specimen location.
Here too are interpretive exhibits on the state gemstone (greenstone), stone (Petoskey stone), the history of copper mining, and a three-minute narrated computer animation on the geological process of copper formation.
The museum and its helpful staff are a good starting place for Keweenaw rock-collecting trips. By appointment, the staff will identify minerals people bring in. The large, reasonably priced gift shop is worth a trip in itself. It sells many interesting specimens from 50˘ to $1,000 and up, including inexpensive agate slices, fossil fish, copper and half-breeds (copper and silver in the same rock), agates, slabs of iron ore, and more. Handsome sliced agate bookends ($22 and $33) make beautiful, useful gifts. Other nifty gift ideas: jewelry, rock refrigerator magnets, crystalline amethyst semi-spheres and "cathedrals," cool and inexpensive acrylic stands for displaying specimens, and ponderstones that say things like "Hope" and "Organize."
Geology professor and museum administrator Ted Bornhorst is also the gift shop manager and buyer, so you can be sure he knows the field. For his small, choice selection of books for adults and children he has chosen the Smithsonian Handbooks field guides Rocks and Minerals and Gemstones (each around $20) and DK's short, super-visual Pocket Rocks and Minerals and Pocket Gemstones, each around $7, part of DK's "Pockets Full of Knowledge" series.
Collectors will welcome the beautiful photos and site-specific collecting tips in George Robinson's recent revision of E. W. Heinrich's Mineralogy of Michigan ($45). Alas, Minerals, the book George wrote as the lay-language bridge between casual and serious collectors is not reprinted by Simon & Schuster unless it gets a large, confirmed order — for instance, from Sam's Club, where it may appear at a very attractive price.
"There are very few mineral museums left in universities today," says Tech geology professor Bill Rose. "Geology is not so central. The only university geology museum today that's clearly better than ours is Harvard's." Geology, though no longer central to the institution's mission, remains important at Tech.
Furthermore, many avid amateur mineralogists and copper collectors either live in the area or come here on collecting expeditions. So the Seaman Museum today is in expansion mode, thanks to an increasing number of donors and friends. Many great North American mineral collectors think of this as a possible future home for their vast collections.
The museum is raising funds for a new museum, which will be much more visible and convenient for visitors than being on this hard-to-figure-out college campus. It will occupy the Quincy Mine's blacksmith and machine shops, next to the popular Quincy Mine and Hoist. New roofs mean they are no longer open to the elements.
Putting together the Copper Country's two most educational and substantive visitor attractions, and gaining visibility and parking for the Seaman Museum will make a big difference. "We'd like to make the move by 2010," says Stan Dyl, recently retired Seaman director of advancement and planning. "With gifts of $4 to $5 million, we could do phase one within a few years." (—April, 2008)
Hours: generally open year-round Mon-Fri 9-4:30. Also open Sat & Sun noon-5 July thru Sept. Closed on national holidays and Christmas week. Free admission for children under 12 and for the MTU community. Donation requested of others. On the 5th floor of the EERC building, the 2nd tallest building on the Michigan Tech campus. It's in the center of campus across from the library. Parking is readily available in the summer (May thru mid-August), free, in front of the Rozsa performing arts center on the east end of campus. Following sign to the parking lot. Then follow the yellow signs on the light posts to the museum entrance. During the rest of the year, there is a pay lot near the Memorial Union and administration building just off U.S. 41 ($2). Metered parking is by the library and Memorial Union, too. A small, free visitor lot is just off U.S. 41 by the small, white counseling building. Go inside for a permit. See museum.mtu.edu for more information or call (906) 487-2572.
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