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IRON RIVER
POINTS
OF
INTEREST
Iron County Museum. Multifaceted museum includes satisfying exhibits on the area's geology, musical and ethnic heritage, life in mines (great video), plus 24 outdoor buildings (10 old log barns, houses, outbuildings). Of special note: vast folk art logging camp, life in mines (great video), gallery of noted wildlife paintings, inventive décor in artist's home, intact Caspian Mine headframe (powerful!). ...
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Downtown Iron River. A trim, pleasant shopping district with an art supply/gift shop/book shop, a combination of shops in an big old department store, a mild-long trail along the Iron River ...
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Angeli's Central Market/Plaza Cinema. A terrific supermarket with quality, fresh produce, something hard to find in the U.P., as well as a good wine selection, meats, ethnic baked goods. ...
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Ski Brule winter and summer. In a scenic hilly setting is a resort with miles of cross-country skiing trails, two snowboard parks, Alpine skiing, and in summer mountain bike trails, horseback riding, canoeing and tubing ...
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Lake Ottawa Park/Ge Chi Ski Trail. This pleasant Ottawa National Forest park is on crystal-clear, 551-acre Lake Ottawa. It has hiking trails, a swimming beach, fishing pier, and a handsome CCC-era pavilion/bathhouse with fireplaces. ...
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Hiking path to "Treaty Tree" & Mile Post Zero. A short, secluded hike leads to the head of Brule River and the much-contested border between Michigan and Wisconsin ...
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George Young Recreational Complex. Open to the general public, this plush golf course and indoor swimming pool is sited on a 3,300-acre complex bordering 3 lakes. Foxes, deer, and eagles are not unusual sights for golfers here ...
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Wolf Track Nature Trail. A scenic 1.5-mile woodland nature trail with wonderful paintings and text to illuminate one's experience ...
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Pentoga Park. pened in 1922, this is one of Michigan's very first county parks, located at an Ojibwa burial ground. Take an old 3-mile Indian Lake to the Brule River, fish the deep, 1,100-acre Chicaugon Lake for walleye and muskie, or use the swimming beach and picnic area ...
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First Roadside Table. Michigan was a pioneer in providing pleasant rest stops for motorists, and this 1918 picnic spot may well be the very first ever ...
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Iron County Museum
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This is the Upper Peninsula's largest outdoor "pioneer village" museum, and it even includes two art galleries. As of now, 24 buildings have been moved here. The most recent additions are a new fire hall to house fire department exhibits and a 1941 fire truck and the restored Toti Tavern (1912) from the Virgil Location north of Iron River, furnished and complete with its original elaborate mirrored back bar imported from Sicily.
The main museum building has permanent exhibits on local history and a changing exhibit each year.
Ten barns, houses, and outbuildings are of traditional log construction. More buildings are in back behind the big metal museum buildings: mining equipment, a shop complex (print shop, pop shop, barber shop), and the Carrie Jacobs Bond house (see below). There's also an early gas station; the streetcar barn and streetcar that once traveled from Gaastra through Caspian to Iron River. Tucked away to the left, behind the print shop, is the Caspian Mine headframe (see below), fascinating from mechanical, mining, and sculptural points of view. This is a rare opportunity to see an intact headframe up close.
The breadth and depth of this nonprofessional museum is unparalleled in the Upper Peninsula. It's hard to get a handle on what all is here and miss things you might like a lot. The museum certainly can't be seen in a two-hour visit. Get a map at the desk, pick out what you're especially interested in, and the volunteer will give you directions.
There's enough here to explore over several vacations - or a string of rainy days. Many large, flippable panels of local photos give a good look at the way each town looked in boom times. Detailed exhibits go into the Menominee Range's geology. Excellent crayon portraits bring local people to life. Pictures and memorabilia of area brass bands, accordions, and music teachers show the important function music played in adding gaiety and fun to a local life based on hard work.
Don't miss:
• A big, wonderfully carved folk-art model of a logging camp, known as the Monigal Miniatures.
• A cubist mural of miners drilling, painted by a Chicago Art Institute faculty member for the old Iron Inn hotel's lobby.
• The late Joe Canale's realistic coin-operated model iron mine and railroad. An underground car picks up ore from the scraper drift, a skip lifts it to the surface, and a model train hauls the ore to Escanaba's smelters. The museum tries to keep it in working condition.
• "A Day in the Life of a Miner" video in the Mining Memorial (see below).
• The homemade, classically-inspired decor of art teacher Brandon Giovanelli's house. (See below.)
• For fans of wildlife art, waterfowl paintings by a noted duck stamp-winner in the Lee LeBlanc Wildlife Gallery. (See below.)
The work of yet another talented and extremely significant area resident is represented in the late Victorian house lived in by Carrie Jacobs Bond, then the mine doctor's wife. She later became the first American woman to have a successful career writing popular songs —eventually earning over $1 million in royalties, also a first for a woman.
Here in Iron River she already was writing songs when her husband lost his job after the mines closed in the Panic of 1893. Then he became bankrupt from failed investments, and died soon thereafter. Carrie had already published one song, so she moved to Chicago to try writing music to support herself and her children. "I Love You Truly" and "Perfect Day" were the most famous of her many hits. She looked back on her years in Iron River as the happiest in her life.
Her work is held in high esteem by no less a student of American popular music than pianist Max Morath, who launched the ragtime revival of the 1970s. He wrote his master's dissertation on Carrie Jacobs Bond and has produced a lecture/revue based on her songs.
Impetus for the museum came in 1963, when the Pickands-Mather Mining Company pulled out of the area and gave this property to the county for a museum. It had been the site of its offices (now demolished) and its most productive mine. Pickands-Mather's recently restored Caspian Mine headframe is next to the main buildings. Once such headframes dotted the landscape on Michigan's mining ranges and anchored communities and memories. Now very few remain.
To assemble this museum, then-high school teachers Harold and Marcia Bernhardt, who had already started a successful junior historians' club, launched dozens of successful fundraising projects. Evidence of their big hearts and attention to detail is everywhere.
Many of these buildings were threatened by demolition or neglect. Some buildings are furnished to approximate the everyday life of bygone eras. The one-room school, regularly used, is fully equipped, down to a full complement of slates. Other buildings contain exhibits ranging from humdrum to inspired. Many, many more exhibits are in a rambling complex of three new buildings.
In 1912 parishioners mortgaged their homes and took up shovels to build St. Mary's Catholic Church. Their descendants, dismayed when church authorities were about to demolish the surplus small church, were delighted to have it preserved here. Its basement houses the Bernhardt Gallery, based on the collection a well-traveled nurse from Iron River who had been one of Harold Bernhardt's students. The paintings and prints, often of animals and scenes from nature and everyday life around the world, are quite accessible and of interest even to children. Three portraits are by Simmie Knox ( www.simmieknox.com ), the portraitist who painted many African-American heroes and also other political luminaries, including Bill and Hillary Clinton.
The most unusual building is the classical-inspired, mural-filled house of the late Brandon Giovanelli.(pronounced "JU-vuh-NEL-ee"), who grew up in a mining location outside of Iron River. He was the shy, generous, and much-loved art teacher in local high schools and at Gogebic Community College. Greek mythology and Renaissance humanism prompted these sweeping paintings focusing on the human body. His father had built the ranch-style family home from two salvaged WPA construction projects. The art teacher fashioned quite a classy home for his family with Greek entrance columns and a fabulous, statue-filled garden. Giovanelli practiced and collected almost all the arts, including floral still lifes, painted jewelry, and needlepoint for cushions and cutwork, learned from an old Italian woman. He also used simple materials in innovative ways, such as tissue-paper landscapes and panels made of collected old glass. Greek-style dentil molding came from stock lumber-yard materials. Cast-plaster detailing creates a neoclassical effect akin to Wedgewood. The dramatic dining room is a real treasure, with elaborate draperies, art glass lamps, and medallions of Dante and Beatrice, Petrarch and Laura from The Divine Comedy.
Wildlife art and Hollywood cartoons by another artistic native son are showcased in the Lee LeBlanc Wildlife Gallery. LeBlanc (1913-1988) followed a career pattern typical of many of the Upper Peninsula's bright, ambitious sons and daughters. He left Iron River to study art, then worked and prospered in Hollywood for 25 years. As an animator for Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies, he drew Bugs Bunny and Elmer Fudd. He painted scenic backdrops. Retiring at 50, he moved back home so he could fish and hunt. He illustrated picture books with historical subjects and then took up wildlife art, for which he is remembered. Honors included becoming National Ducks Unlimited Artist of the Year. Sale of his prints raised millions of dollars for Ducks Unlimited habitat conservation projects in the Marquette area, Manitoba, Arkansas, and Mississippi. His appealing paintings, mostly of ducks in marshes and lakes, are suffused with a golden light and imbued with a lively peacefulness. It's also interesting to see products of LeBlanc's Hollywood career, from pinup girls to backdrop paintings used in the movies Please, Don't Eat the Daisies and Ben Hur.
The museum has sponsored many noteworthy research projects, including one of Michigan's earliest and most comprehensive surveys of historic buildings. The Mining Memorial not only lists the names of 561 people killed in the Iron River area mines, but also has a computer database with information on every mine and miner in the area. A video monitor shows "A Day in the Life" video of miners at work in the 1950s. It uses not just the expected smooth promotional PR films but footage shot by an amateur photographer friend of many miners. It has the goofy, intimate feel of home movies. "The Iron River Story" looks back on mining days.
The museum has published several glossy 8 _" x 11" books with oral and meaty oral and composed histories and many photographs documenting aspects of Iron County life. The museum sells them for $30 including postage; the office is staffed all year so orders can be e-mailed or phoned. Men, Mines and Memories documents nearly every Iron County mine and has overviews of labor history and unions. Miners describe their jobs, and women and children remember life in mining locations. Artists buy Barns, Farms and Yarns for over 300 photographs of barns, often in evocative stages of decay. And the text surveys Iron County agriculture and adds lots of recollections of farms: Polish, Finnish, the ill-fated Triangle cattle ranch scheme, chickens, potatoes of course, and cows.
It all makes for a most impressive grassroots, nonprofessional museum. It's an interesting place for exploring by unjaded kids who like poking around and by adults with some natural curiosity. Interpretation of local history to outsiders is low on the museum's priority list, however. There's an implicit assumption that most visitors are probably descended from local people and that they are already familiar with the basic outlines of local history, and ready to delve into details. Nevertheless, many summer visitors from afar enjoy this place and the people they meet here.
Each year a wide array of events with separate admission fees take place here: a summer children's workshop on nature; Italian and Scandinavian ethnic festivals; band concerts; various food and crafts fairs. The annual events schedule comes out in May and appears on the museum website: www.ironcountymuseum.com
The small museum shop sells publications about the area and gifts and collectibles that raise money for the museum.
In Caspian just northwest of downtown at Brady and Park. From M-189, south of Iron River, look for the sign at the Caspian Cutoff. Or (the more revealing route), from U.S. 2, turn south and go up the Stambaugh Hill on Washington, opposite McDonald's, between the church and the tavern. At First, turn left, go 3 blocks to Lincoln, then right. Follow signs. (906) 265-2617. Open June thru Sept, daily 9-5, Sun 1-5 Central Time. In May (school visitation season) hours are weekdays 8:30 a.m. to 2 p.m. Admission $7/adult, $2.50/ child under 16.
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