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Jul. 17th, 2009 09:09 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
stormdogIn the small, unincorporated town of Ripley, Michigan, just across the Portage Lake Canal from it's more populous neighbor, Houghton, stand the remains of the Quincy Smelter.
The smelter is the only extant facility of its type in the Lake Superior region. It was operated from 1898 to 1971, its use trailing off in its later years. From '67 on, it was used for melting scrap copper, and prior to that spent a while smelting copper out of reclaimed waste sand from the mines rather than smelting mined ore, but in its heyday, it processed millions of tons of copper ore from the Quincy mines further northeast along the peninsula.
The Mineral Range and Copper Range railroads served the site, and the tracks alongside the buildings are some of a very few remaining lengths of track of those railroads. An abandoned locomotive and tender remain on the grounds; I'd love to know more about them.
For those interested in reading more about the sites in the Keweenau, or looking for information to plan their own trips, there's a wealth of information over here at The Copper Country Explorer. What an awesome website. I wish I'd found it a month before my trip there, rather than a month after.
The smelter is the only extant facility of its type in the Lake Superior region. It was operated from 1898 to 1971, its use trailing off in its later years. From '67 on, it was used for melting scrap copper, and prior to that spent a while smelting copper out of reclaimed waste sand from the mines rather than smelting mined ore, but in its heyday, it processed millions of tons of copper ore from the Quincy mines further northeast along the peninsula.
The Mineral Range and Copper Range railroads served the site, and the tracks alongside the buildings are some of a very few remaining lengths of track of those railroads. An abandoned locomotive and tender remain on the grounds; I'd love to know more about them.
For those interested in reading more about the sites in the Keweenau, or looking for information to plan their own trips, there's a wealth of information over here at The Copper Country Explorer. What an awesome website. I wish I'd found it a month before my trip there, rather than a month after.
