LAKE LINDEN

Region: Keweenaw Peninsula

Lake Linden was a very different looking city into the 1960s, when Calumet & Hecla's huge plants still operated that extracted copper in discarded tailings from ore mined decades before. In 1970 C&H ceased all operations.

Lake Linden and Hubbell, its unincorporated neighboring community on M-26, profited from their locations on the shores of narrow Torch Lake. It connected to the Keweenaw Waterway via a natural channel at Dollar Bay. Large vessels could travel all the way to local docks. Lumber was sawn and shipped from Lake Linden. Torch Lake got its name from Indians who fished at night with torches and spears. The lake connects with the Keweenaw Waterway (sometimes called Portage Lake) and Lake Superior. That's why six different businesses in town are called "Lakes."

Lake Linden's downtown in 2005.

By the late 1880s the big white pines were gone. (Many were used as underground support for nearby copper mines.) Finns were turning the area's cutover land into farms. Meanwhile, Lake Linden and Hubbell were becoming the sites of Calumet & Hecla's copper stamping mill and smelter.

Impressive as the exterior of St. Joesph's Catholic Church is, the interior is stunning. Built by a largely French congregation, it is often open and well worth a visit.

Lake Linden was largely settled by French-Canadians who worked in the woods (a preferred occupation for them), in lumber mills, and later in the surface copper-stamping mills and smelters along its waterfront. Today it remains a French town. Here and elsewhere, at least in the Midwest, French names are seldom pronounced the French way. "Gervais," for instance, is not "GURR-vay" but "JAR-viss." "Gregory" is the locally correct pronunciation for the name of Joseph Gregoire, who came to the area as a young man in the 1850s, worked as a woodcutter, helped start a sawmill, and eventually came to own 65,000 acres of timberland.

By the 19th century, Quebec's large and fertile French-Canadian population of habitants (independent peasant farmers) had grown to exceed the capacity of their farms and villages to support them. The struggling Canadian economy offered them few opportunities.

French-Canadian clerics and lawyers were the decision-makers in that stratified society. They grappled with the issue of relocation: what new places were most promising for continuing their community, language, faith, and culture. Many leaders felt that new lands to the west — like Lake Linden's woods — offered better prospects for French-Canadian group survival than settling in the industrializing mill towns of nearby Maine and Massachusetts.

Outside New England, Michigan had the largest migration of French-Canadians in the U.S. This is discussed on Detroit genealogist John DuLong's extensive web page on "Tracing French Canadians in Michigan's Copper Country" on habitant.org/houghton/fcgenealogy. (Search elsewhere for his genealogy of none other than Madonna, back to the 16th century. Her mother was one of eastern Michigan's many French Canadians.)

Calumet & Hecla's great innovation was to develop a process that efficiently extracted small amounts of copper deposits carried by much of the area's rock. A key to the process was a stamping mill to crush the rock brought up from the mines. C&H's first stamping mill, built in 1866, crushed rock transported by narrow-gauge railway from the company's Calumet-area mines down the steep hill to Lake Linden/Hubbell. A smelter then extracted copper from the crushed rock. By 1873 an astounding 10,000 tons a year of ingot copper was shipped from here.

The later stamping mill and smelter were among the world's largest. They finally closed during the 1968 strike that brought an end to area copper mining.

Most workers who live in Lake Linden now commute to jobs elsewhere. It is home to one of the Upper Peninsula's more unusual businesses: Nitrate Elimination Co. Inc. (906-296-1000) at 217 Calumet Street/M-26. Founded by a Michigan Tech professor and his wife, the biotech company has garnered substantial federal research grants for developing enzyme-based products for water testing and treatment. It also sells a home nitrate testing kit.

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