Attend a Michigan Tech hockey game, as so many students and community members have loved to do over the years, and there’s no escaping the music. That’s not to say that anyone would desire such an escape: the rocking, rollicking Huskies Pep Band keeps the crowd entertained and excited about supporting the team. With catchy . . .
Julia Dally was a Cornishwoman by birth, blood, and upbringing. She knew, when she married a miner, that her husband might die under tragic circumstances. Surely she did not expect that tragedy to come at the point of a gun in his sleep, thousands of miles from their native land. Like many immigrants to the . . .
Planes, trains, and automobiles: there was a time when a person bound for the Copper Country could choose any of the three ways to travel. Although many decades have passed since train whistles echoed through Keweenaw towns, cars naturally remain popular, and our Houghton County Memorial Airport continues to serve Copper Country fliers. Early airports . . .
August evenings in the Copper Country tend to be warm and relaxing, the type of atmosphere that invites people to sit on porches and savor the summer. For Calumet on August 13, 1983, evening peace would be impossible as a century of history vanished into the flames. In 1868, the place later called Calumet was . . .
Cross the Portage Lake Lift Bridge, northbound or southbound, or take a walk along the canal in Houghton, and you can’t help but notice it. The Jacobsville sandstone building standing on the Houghton end of the bridge has greeted passersby for well over a hundred years, serving an impressive array of purposes in its century . . .
What stands out in people’s memories? Ask that question of a dozen passersby, and you might get a dozen answers: weddings, births, graduations, special vacations. All of these examples are good, noble, and vivid. But, if we’re honest with ourselves, we might add something else to the list: we remember food. To give us a . . .
To Copper Country locals, “White City” today evokes images of a sandy beach–a rarity in the Keweenaw–with the Huron Mountains’ verdant, distant slopes rising above a glistening Lake Superior. Visitors reach this beach by driving south from Lake Linden toward Jacobsville, following a winding township road that offers glimpses of Torch Lake. A hundred years . . .
Dominic and Mary Vairo were in their kitchen when they heard the commotion upstairs. The voices were loud, insistent, emotional. Had a fight broken out? With tension palpable in town, fisticuffs even at a party would surprise no one. Worse–as Dominic listened closer to the cries–was it a fire? A fire kindling on the second . . .
It was the boss’s house, the boss’s rules, and the boss’s style. Michigan’s copper mines regularly provided housing to their workforces. Indeed, a company who did not offer dwellings felt itself at a disadvantage in trying to attract workers. Thus row after row of homes arose in the shadows of shafthouses, echoing quietly with the . . .
From the earliest days of silent films in nickelodeons to the convenience of Netflix, Americans have embraced movies with a passion reserved for few other entertainments. What date could be more typical than dinner and a movie? How many of us recall in vivid detail our first film or a movie that inspired our first . . .