The industrial powerhouses of the Western Upper Peninsula are the sprawling city of Iron Mountain (pop. 8,150), with its dispersed neighborhoods built around mineshafts, and its younger, trimmer sister city of Kingsford (population 5,549), which mushroomed around a Ford Motor Company complex in 1923.
To the casual motorist, the sprawl on U.S. 2 going through the Iron  | | On the southern edge of downtown, the impressive Dickinson County Courthouse was built in 1896. The last of Michigan's 83 counties, Dickinson came into being in 1891 as Menominee Range mines proliferated in the area. | Mountain area is off-putting. But Iron Mountain has its share of tucked-away beauty spots and some memorable people, downtown businesses, and restaurants. Iron Mountain is known for good homestyle Italian cooking. And it's one of the very few places in the U.P. where fashion is even relevant, as seen in the high-caliber donated merchandise at its thrift stores (an attractive Goodwill in the Midtown Mall on U.S. 2 just east of downtown, and St. Vincent de Paul's at 117 West A Street downtown).
Note on alphabetical street names: Iron Mountain's central area developed south from the Chapin Mine, which collapsed to form a pit in 1940. Streets go south from the pit, from A and B streets in downtown's core to H and I on the south side.
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The big 6-story office building you see passing through Iron Mountain's downtown on U.S. 2 stands awkwardly alone. Though still in use, the striking 1927 Art Deco bank building dwarfs other downtown buildings. As early as 1900, Minnesota's Mesabi Range more efficient open pit iron mines were gaining dominance, helping to stunt Iron Mountain's growth. | Iron Mountain's earliest settlers arrived when iron was found here in 1879. By 1886 the population had skyrocketed to 8,000. Two years later Iron Mountain's mines, the Chapin, the Hamilton, and the Millie, employed 3,525 men. In 1914 the boom years around 1890 were described in a talk by Mrs. Isaac Ungerer, wife of a local retail businessman. Times were good, she said, and the city prosperous and spreading out in all directions, and the people spending money like water.
 | | The wide Menominee River, separting Michigan from Wisconsin, curves around the west sides of Iron Mountain and Kingsford. | She recalled with pride various improvements befitting Iron Mountain's new prominence, tossing in an occasional comment on the all-important social distinctions to be maintained between miners and their betters. She reported that in 1887 alone the area got a new pulp mill (at Quinnesec Falls, home of a giant paper plant today), the Bell Telephone system, and a hospital "admitting such patients as were not acceptable at the Chapin Hospital." The opening of a hotel was celebrated by a grand ball given for the aristocracy of Iron Mountain, followed by a party "for the less fortunate brothers."
 | | While iron ore was long the economic basis of the Iron Mountain region, making paper from U.P. trees now keeps the economy going. International Paper's Quinnesec Mill on U.S. 2 five miles east of Iron Mountain is the largest plant in the U.P. Built in 1985, it employs over 540 and makes coated paper. Big logging trucks from near and far bring an almost constant flow of timber here. | By 1890, larger, better capitalized operators were buying up many mines throughout the iron ranges. Then the Panic of 1893 caused widespread layoffs and the threat of violence. Little note has been made of how ownership of Michigan iron mines, like many other spheres of American capitalism of the time, were controlled by the notorious monopolistic financial and transportation octopuses and trusts. These combinations of mining, shipping, rail, and financial interests provoked Frank Norris's muckraking novels and the trust-busting reforms of Theodore Roosevelt and the Progressive Era.
After the Panic of 1893, mines closed, and it looked as if unemployed miners might resort to violence. The Chapin Mine and many other Menominee Range mines were bought at fire-sale prices by Mark Hanna, the Cleveland iron magnate. As the natinal Republican Party boss, he was so powerful that he engineered McKinley's presidential victory over the populist William Jennings Bryan in 1896. Hanna controlled a huge segment of the entire nation's business interests. In 1914 Mrs. Ungerer, the ladies' club historian, expressed gratitude about how" the Hon. Mark A. Hanna came to our rescue, by taking over the Chapin Mine and putting 500 men to work."
Today Iron Mountain mainly sprawls along its busy highways and around its old mine pits. Adjoining Kingsford bears the stamp of 1920s subdivisions familiar to anyone who grew up around Detroit. That's because the town developed around a complex of Ford plants from the early 1920s. Henry Ford, in his quest for industrial independence and self-sufficiency, wanted to own the source of his raw materials. The U.P. had both the iron used in steelmaking and the wood then used for auto bodies.
Ford's energetic scouts bought up vast amounts of timberland and created the first Ford sawmill, one of the world's most modern, on a farm Ford bought outside Iron Mountain. By 1923 the area was incorporated as the village of Kingsford, named after Edward Kingsford, the Iron Mountain Ford dealer and timber cruiser who married Henry Ford's cousin and became a key figure in Ford's Upper Peninsula operations.
Just as in Detroit, Kingsford's main street was Woodward, leading from Carpenter Ave./M-95 to the Ford Airport at Cowboy Lake. It's an attractive little airport, with regular Midwest Airlines flights to Midwest's Milwaukee hub and beyond. Kingsford High teams are known as the Flivvers, a term for a cheap vehicle, often applied to the Ford Model T.
Ford dammed the Menominee River just south of Kingsford and built a hydroelectric plant. Soon after incorporation, Ford's Kingsford complex included lumber kilns; plants to manufacture finished wood parts shipped to body builders; a refinery; and a chemical plant that produced antifreeze, paint solvents, and Kingsford charcoal briquettes, the world's first, developed in 1921 to make use of waste wood. Hardwood chips were charred, ground, mixed with starch, and compressed to form nearly a hundred tons per day, according to Ford R. Bryan in Beyond the Model T: The Other Ventures of Henry Ford. Chapters on Waterpower, 'Northern Michigan Lumber, Mines, and Aircraft touch on Ford's Upper Peninsula projects.
Ford's Iron Mountain operations were the largest industrial complex in the Upper Peninsula. In 1937, “when all-steel bodies prevailed, Iron Mountain then produced Ford station wagon bodies [the much-loved woodies] complete and ready for the final drop on the assembly line,� Bryan writes. The woodworking plant closed after Pearl Harbor. Its skilled woodworkers went back to work when the plant reopened in 1942 to produce large gliders, designed to silently carry 40 troops or two helicopters behind enemy lines. The gliders were an especially proud phase of Iron Mountain history.
Today the Ford plants' site, at Breitung and Balsam, is mostly vacant. City officials voted to demolish the landmark stacks a few years ago. As in Dearborn, the residential areas planned for management and workers were separated. Workers' housing was south of Breitung Avenue and the plants, while managers lived in Kingsford Heights, north of Woodward near the airport and golf course. Another older, relatively elite neighborhood is just to the east in the city of Iron Mountain, around Crystal Lake at the west end of H Street.
After Henry Ford died, his far-flung Upper Peninsula empire was critically scrutinized by Ford management for cost-effectiveness and gradually sold off. The briquette company eventually moved south but still bears the Kingsford name.
Civic leaders actively recruited businesses to make up for Ford's pullout. The Iron Mountain area continues to have one of the strongest economic bases in the U.P. Paper mills are big employers: International Paper (formerly Champion) in Quinnesec (602 employees), StoraEnso (formerly the old Kimberly Clark Kleenex plant, more recently Consolidated Papers) in Niagara (450), and the Louisiana Pacific plant that makes 4x8-foot particle board in Sagola (178). Another large and fast-growing firm, Cable Constructors, has over 500 employees who install TV cable systems around the country. The large Wisconsin-based Grede foundry empire has a foundry in Kingsford with 485 employees. They make valves and other grey iron castings with complex internal shapes. Nationally prominent Khoury's 150 employees make do-it-yourself furniture kits.
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