Tag: Flashback Friday

Good times seem that they will never end.

When Calumet & Hecla was in its prime, the future seemed to promise unalloyed brilliance. The company was the richest in a district that produced 12 to 16 percent of the world’s copper between 1880 and 1910. The company “ruled its region,” historian Larry Lankton wrote, “with a haughty self-assuredness that the only way to mine for copper, or to run a mining community, was the C&H way.” In the late 1800s and early 1900s, C&H seemed vindicated. Although plenty of have-nots called the residential areas around its mines home, Calumet and Laurium also abounded with signs of prosperity. In 1900, the imposing Calumet Theatre, with its sandstone facade and a proscenium arch adorned with murals of the Greek muses, opened on Sixth Street. Pedestrians strolled along wooden sidewalks underneath a growing spider web of electrical wires. Shoppers could browse through a number of specialty shops, including photographers’ studios, multistory department stores like the Vertin Brothers, and jewelers. Multiple newspapers circulated in town. Presidential candidates campaigned personally in the area: Theodore Roosevelt stopped in Laurium to promote his 1912 third-party bid. Although no truth existed to later rumors that Calumet would be made the capital of Michigan, it was undoubtedly the capital of the Copper Country.

But no boom town lasts forever. Calumet’s star faded in the wake of the 1913-1914 strike, a post-World War I slump in the copper market, and later still with the onset of the Great Depression. In 1910, the population of Calumet Township was 32,845; by 1920, it had declined to 22,369, a decrease of more than 31 percent, as people sought jobs elsewhere. By 1970, the township had only about one-quarter of the population it had enjoyed at its peak. Even more notably, Calumet & Hecla had finally closed for good. Failure of employees and management to agree to terms on a new contract in August 1968 led to a strike that dragged into the spring of 1969. The company’s new owners, Universal Oil Products, ultimately elected to cease all mining operations. Although some hope remained of eventually dewatering the Centennial Mine, and some Calumet workers rode daily chartered buses down to Ontonagon County’s White Pine Mine, the era of mining had ended.

The profound changes wrought by mining and population growth remained, and so did the people who remembered and appreciated the Copper Country in its heyday. Local residents had long been passionate about history, forming societies and museums to keep their heritage alive even when the mines were still running. The Keweenaw Historical Society, under the leadership of John T. Reeder and John A. Doelle, began to collect archival material on the Keweenaw Peninsula in 1912. The Houghton County Historical Society, a successor organization, began in 1961; its counterpart in Ontonagon County dates to 1957. Yet appreciation for history as a means to keep the Copper Country alive reached greater heights after the mining period drew to a close.

One proposal perceiving history as a means of revitalization took a particularly grand, sweeping, and in some ways eyebrow-raising approach. Its creators dubbed the vision “Coppertown U.S.A.” In an April 3, 1973 presentation in Calumet, Robert Teska, a representative of the project through Barton-Aschman Associates, described Coppertown as “a plan to restore and expand the former Calumet & Hecla headquarters… into a historic mining, ethnic, and tourism complex.” The project’s main purpose would be “the creation of a historic center and service facility for Copper Country tourism, to be entertaining and educational and to be integrated into the social and economic fabric of the two communities of Calumet and Laurium.” Ideally, Teska explained, Coppertown would span “in excess of 300 acres overall” across the heart of the old C&H properties, with its center “ideally located at the historic crossroads of U.S. 41 and Red Jacket Road.”

The Coppertown U.S.A. complex proved broad not only in scale but in scope. Teska laid out a plan for multiple “development units” surrounding the “theme center.” The heart of Coppertown would host parking for well over 1,000 vehicles. Mine Street, the road along which so many shafts had been dug, would become a pedestrian path along which tourists could stroll. Behind the former C&H library building–serving as administrative headquarters–Barton-Aschman Associates envisioned the old roundhouse transformed into an entertainment megaplex, in conjunction with a newly-constructed motel. There, visitors could dine, browse boutiques and art galleries, pick up drug store necessities, or take in a musical performance. While most of Coppertown had a tourist orientation, the roundhouse would be designed as a gathering place for locals, as well.

The theme center was just the start. A second development unit incorporated “several satellite activities” of diverse types. A museum village consisting of “10 to 15 authentic buildings moved to the site from [throughout] the Copper Country and restored to reflect a period in history” would sit adjacent to Mine Street. Teska’s presentation suggested that the village might consist of a general store, church, schoolhouse, blacksmith shop, and “several residences that would typify the homes of early miners and of various ethnic backgrounds.” Summer employees and school tour groups traveling from a distance would bunk down in a special dormitory built for their use. When they ventured out beyond the roundhouse and museum village, they would find a host of activities devoted to copper mining awaiting them.

Recognizing the popularity of the Arcadian Mine in Ripley–and presaging the success of Quincy, Delaware, and Adventure–the Barton-Aschman proposal for Coppertown U.S.A extensively incorporated demonstrations of mining technology, techniques, and properties. “The highlight of the satellite activities would be the Osceola Mine,” explained Teska, “a modern facility that would be restored for use as a major attraction offering an underground tour of an actual copper mine.” Tourists visiting Osceola could hop aboard “a small historic mining train,” sure to delight children and adults alike. Later, back on Mine Street, they would find Coppertown’s exhibition center, “an entertaining and educational display featuring the history of copper mining, the technology used, old equipment, and demonstrations of actual mining and maintenance techniques.” From there, the visitors would stroll through another hall displaying new copper products. If they tired of studying copper mining itself, the Coppertown ethnic and cultural center would provide them the opportunity to learn more about the cultures of Keweenaw people, both immigrant and indigenous. “The center would be a place where ethnic crafts and food would be made and sold, Teska said, “where people of all ages would come to participate in authentic folk music and dancing, and where the joys of folklore would prevail. Employees would be dressed in costumes representing their native homelands.” Folk culture would spill out into the “festival plaza,” a decorated outdoor space that would be “a focal point of community as well as tourist activity.”

Crowning the entirety of Coppertown, “several hundred feet to the northwest” of the festival plaza, would be a statue of a miner standing some 70 to 80 feet tall. If Keweenaw Bay had its shrine to Bishop Baraga, then Calumet would have a monument to the industry that built it.

Of course, none of this–the renovation of Osceola, the construction of a new motel, the commissioning of a copper statue–would come cheap. Barton-Aschman estimated that, in addition to land, Coppertown U.S.A “will require… a considerable investment of approximately 12 million dollars.” In 2019, an equivalent investment would total over $70 million. To assuage anyone who balked at the high price tag, Teska promised that Coppertown would quickly pay for itself, bringing droves of visitors to the Keweenaw with money to spend. The statistics presented by the consulting firm were staggering: one million visitors per summer to the area by 1980, with as many as 850,000 people–both locals and tourists–stopping in at Coppertown. Each summer, the Barton-Aschman presentation said, Coppertown would lead to a gross income of over $5 million; winter tourism would be the icing on the cake. In addition, the complex stood poised to bolster local tax revenues, employ a populace that could no longer look to the mines, and unify Calumet and Laurium.

At the time that Barton-Aschman Associates presented the plan for Coppertown U.S.A, it must have seemed like a marvelous and realizable dream to its boosters. If the inspiration and funds of Henry Ford could bring Greenfield Village to life, why could the people and companies of the Keweenaw Peninsula not do the same? Supporters who signed on to the plan early on included Endicott Lovell, a former president of Calumet & Hecla, William Nicholls, vice president of the Copper Range Company, and Louis Koepel, who had charge of the Quincy Mining Company property in Hancock; joining them were prominent local contractor Herman Gundlach, multimillionaire philanthropist and Laurium native Percy Ross, and historian Arthur Thurner, among others. Although some local residents, despite fundamental agreement with developing tourist appeal in the region, expressed skepticism of the project, its Copper Country directors set up in the old Calumet & Hecla library building with great anticipation. Promotional literature brimming with optimism scurried through the post offices and into newspapers across the state, and a sign proclaiming Calumet the future home of Coppertown went up on the edge of town.

Yet the project’s grand scale proved to be in large part its undoing. Despite the support of millionaires and bank executives, the $12 million needed for that initial investment was difficult to raise. By 1975, although the dream remained alive and its board active, some reductions had already been made. A newspaper article describing the aim of Coppertown described the would-be iconic miner statue as standing some 35 to 40 feet, only about half of its original intended height. Plans for the motel, the roundhouse shopping complex, and hauling historic buildings from their homes throughout the Copper Country stalled. In 1979, the old Calumet & Hecla pattern shop opened as a museum and visitor center for the future project.

By 1980, however, local newspaper the Copper Island Sentinel wrote that Coppertown was highly unlikely to come to fruition as originally planned.

“According to the original plans, Coppertown was to be a complex of buildings, including a hotel, library, cultural center, 70 foot statue and plaza area that would accommodate 650,000 tourists a year. Those plans have yet to be totally abandoned, unlike the mines it was to hold in tribute. But the reality of the present is those future dreams rely on the 14 women of the Coppertown Auxiliary and the profit margin of a small boutique that supports the only operating attraction of the development–the Coppertown Museum.”

Despite the best efforts of the auxiliary women and those who staffed the pattern shop, the Coppertown U.S.A project went no further than that. However, a little over a decade after the Sentinel piece, a different effort to organize, preserve, and promote the Copper Country’s historic resources saw its hopes realized. Keweenaw National Historical Park was officially established on October 27, 1992. Although its approach to tourist facilities proved quite different than its predecessor project, the new park shared certain values with Coppertown: a passion for a special past, a devotion to revitalizing mining towns, and a desire to share the ethnic treasures of our community with the world at large. Today, the Coppertown U.S.A museum remains in operation as a long-term member of the Keweenaw Heritage Sites network of the national park. Long after the mines have faded, the heritage left behind is more vibrant than ever.

Charles Kauppi belonged on the water.

He hailed from Kuivaniemi, a parish of Finland with a lengthy stretch of coastline on the Gulf of Bothnia. A river cut the parish in two, flowing past a small, rural settlement that bore the Kauppi name.

Perhaps his draw to the water was evident at an early age; perhaps it began when Kalle, as he was known then, looked across the ocean toward the United States. He and his older brother, Juho Aukusti, set sail for Houghton in the company of several friends. They departed in September 1902, when Kalle was twenty years old. In those days, the journey from Finland to America was a long one. A Finn headed to the Copper Country would first take a ship to England, then wait for a transatlantic liner. He might land in Boston or New York; he might instead go north to Montreal or Quebec City, then journey into Michigan through Sault Ste. Marie. Kalle and Juho’s ship, the Celtic, deposited them in New York Harbor on September 29, and the two set off for Michigan.

Many Finns came to the Copper Country in hopes of earning enough money to return home and buy a farm in Europe. For a variety of reasons–new comfort in the New World, more affordable land, the ardor of the journey–the number who actually made the trip proved far smaller than the group that hoped to do so. Kalle chose to file for American citizenship but had no qualms about crossing the Atlantic once again, even during difficult times of the year: February 1910 found him passing through Liverpool en route to Kuivaniemi for a visit. Six months later, he once again crossed the Atlantic, this time aboard the Virginian: the trip must have seemed almost routine by then. He landed in Quebec City, crossed the border as American citizen Charles Kauppi, and headed back to his new home in the Copper Country. He left the Baltic Sea of his childhood and the Atlantic Ocean of his youth behind, but an inland sea–Lake Superior–called to him.

When Charles Kauppi married Helena Lamberg, an early settler at Toivola and a fellow Finnish immigrant, on May 8, 1913, he gave his occupation as janitor. Increasingly, however, his work shifted away from mines and onto the waves. “On [a] Sunday morning” of unknown date, wrote Mac Frimodig in his Keweenaw Character, “while fishing with the Jaasko brothers at Grand Traverse, he ‘saw the sun come out of the lake’ and at that moment he knew his career in the mine was over.” By 1920, a census taker found the Kauppis–Charles, Helena, daughters Lyla, Leona, and soon Lilian, and son Willard–ensconced in “a log cabin with an unobstructed view of his beloved emerging sun” just north of the Keweenaw County village of Gay. Gay, with a Lake Superior shoreline reminiscent of Kuivaniemi’s gulf coast, provided a fisherman the ideal place to launch his craft and trawl the crystalline waters. As the location of the Mohawk Mining Company’s stamp mill, it also provided employment for Charles the mariner when winter settled over the lake, dimming his financial prospects.

The Mohawk Mill closed in 1932, casting a pall over Gay. By now, however, the Kauppi family’s interests had turned even further away from the fortunes of the copper mines. Despite the looming Great Depression, tourists found Isle Royale–that long, rugged, forested island near the Canadian border–increasingly attractive, and Charles Kauppi recognized an opportunity. Why not offer ferry service to island-bound voyagers using one of his own vessels, the Water Lily? The boat might be better suited to fishing than to passenger service, with its cramped quarters and dark interior, but the captain soon known to all as “Charlie” carved out advantages nonetheless. By sailing from Copper Harbor, much closer to Isle Royale than the competing Michigan port at Houghton, Kauppi would reduce the time that passengers were on the water. He also applied his natural sisu and tendency for risk-taking to his lake journeys, venturing out on days when few others would make the trip. More on that later.

The Water Lily and her captain quickly found a toehold in the ferry world. Charlie began his Copper Harbor-Isle Royale journeys in 1930, give or take a year depending on the source consulted. Despite a number of challenges brought on by the Depression–what Don Kilpela, intimately familiar with the Isle Royale ferry business, later called “a normal man’s nightmare” in Lake Superior Magazine–Kauppi persevered. The news arrived in March 1931 that Isle Royale would soon become a national park, a decision that boosted the island’s profile and brought more passengers to Copper Harbor. By the middle of the 1930s, Charlie had outgrown the Water Lily. He commissioned a 48-foot long replacement named the Copper Queen, a lovely craft that cut a fine figure on the water and would seat far more people than her predecessor.

Unfortunately for Charlie Kauppi, his new vessel arrived at a time of increasing government regulations surrounding scheduled passenger ferries. The bulkheads below deck on the Copper Queen were not watertight, one of the new parameters, and the government rejected Kauppi’s application for scheduled ferry service. Over the next few years, he continued to run his charters, charging $5 per person for a round trip, and in 1938 took delivery of the Isle Royale Queen, a vessel that met government requirements. Regularly-scheduled passenger service between Copper Harbor and Isle Royale began that year, launching over eighty years of ferries. In the early days, when Charlie Kauppi was at the helm, the ride could be a wild one.

Lake Superior is capricious; its moods change on a whim. Children raised on the lake quickly learn to respect it and to know when to stay on land. Charlie Kauppi knew his limits, as well. They simply happened to be far beyond what most people would accept. Don Kilpela, in a blog post about the history of the ferry service, recounted a “probably apocryphal” story about the time that Charlie did finally put his foot down–or try to do so. In 1943, following an overnight layover on the island, Kauppi awoke, appraised the storm rolling in, and decided that he would not go out. The waves were some 14 to 18 feet high, enough to overwhelm larger boats than Charlie’s. One big city passenger, upon hearing that his trip back to the mainland was postponed, refused to accept it. He began to argue with Kauppi, who held firm until the passenger said, “I didn’t know that Finns had a yellow streak down their back.”

No one called Charlie Kauppi a coward and got away with it. He relented and agreed to take the angry passenger back to Copper Harbor, along with a handful of others. After an hour of merciless buffeting by the wind and rolling over waves that make one seasick just to imagine, the big city man begged Charlie to go back. He apologized. He pleaded. None of it worked: Charlie was too stubborn now to relent. To quote Kilpela:

Finally, the man asked, “Are we going to make it?”

Charlie answered, “We go as far as we can.”

And if that story was, in fact, apocryphal, countless genuine incidents proved Kauppi’s determination and skill on the water. January 1940 saw one of the more dramatic ones. Louis Baranowski, a native of Calumet, had been stationed on Isle Royale as a radio operator for the National Park Service. Winter surrounded the island, which gained a new sense of isolation as the snow fell and the parade of passing ships tapered off. In the midst of this, Baranowski received word that his father had died. Families belong together in times of grief, and someone wondered if there could be a way to bring Baranowski home to Calumet. The logical choice–the only choice–was to ask Charlie Kauppi.

The day that Kauppi set out from Gay, still his home, on the mission of mercy, a nasty blizzard rolled across western Lake Superior. Wind screamed through open cracks in cabins; visibility diminished; thermometers hovered near zero. Lighthouses at Eagle Harbor and Copper Harbor were relit in hopes of helping Charlie on his way. The Isle Royale Queen, carrying Kauppi and his future son-in-law Emil Wiitala, made slow progress toward the tip of the peninsula. As waves nearing 20 to 30 feet broke over the Queen’s bow, they froze, encasing the boat in ice. Kauppi and Wiitala pressed on, hoping against hope that the weather might break. Rounding Keweenaw Point, they realized that to continue was suicide. Kauppi wrestled the vessel into port at Copper Harbor, conceding defeat for once in his life. The beacons along the coast went dark. If Charlie couldn’t make it, no one could.

Charlie Kauppi ran the ferry for the rest of his days. The years between his acquisition of the Isle Royale Queen and his death proved to be eventful ones. After years of “extreme and repeated cruelty,” to quote the court documents, at the hands of his wife Helena, Charlie filed for divorce. His petition was granted on November 1, 1937. Ten years later, in his winter home of Grand Rapids, Charlie remarried. The new Linda Kauppi, a widow, shared her husband’s Finnish roots and Copper Country background. Charlie became a grandfather several times over, through his daughter Lyla and son Willard, and kept his love for the lake alive for as long as he drew breath.

In February 1954, Charlie Kauppi died at his Grand Rapids residence; he was 71 years old. Loved ones saw to it that a stone was erected in his honor at Hancock’s Lakeside Cemetery sometime later. Willard Kauppi sold his father’s boat and business to Ward Grosnick, who passed the helm to the Kilpela family upon his retirement in 1971. The Kilpelas operate the Isle Royale Queen IV to this day, keeping the sort of sisu and ingenuity that defined Charlie Kauppi a part of Keweenaw County tradition. Photographs from the Kauppi ferry service now reside in the Michigan Tech Archives as MS-898: Kauppi Family Collection.

Posts from Don Kilpela, Sr., on his Circumnavigating blog, as well as his “Lake Superior Magazine” piece (linked above) and Mac Frimodig’s book “Keweenaw Character” informed this post. 

Like Robert Frost’s famous woods, the lake is lovely, dark, and deep.

Lake Superior claims a number of superlatives. By surface area, it is the largest freshwater lake in the world; by volume, it is the third among its peers. The deepest point, north of Munising, is among the lowest places above sea level in North America. Any swimmer knows that it is the coldest of the Great Lakes, and its most sincere fans faithfully swear that it is the most beautiful lake on Earth.

For all its charms, and in part because it is a lake among lakes, Lake Superior also poses a unique danger to the vessels that sail it. Merchant mariners realized this quickly as commerce on the lake grew. By 1844, just as the copper mining rush was set to begin, the John Jacob Astor had floundered at Copper Harbor. As century wore on–and as the boom in the Upper Peninsula progressed–it brought with it the creation of the Soo Locks, more ships on the lake, and a growing number of vessels beneath the waves. Late autumn storms, hidden shoals, rocky shores, capricious winds, and other hazards of the lake claimed an expanding list of victims.

Safe navigation of the mighty lake required guidance and guideposts. Mariners needed to know where the shoreline lay and where perils in the water might threaten their journey. Although industrial-scale shipping was new to Lake Superior, the solution was an ancient one. Lighthouses would steer sailors and their vessels away from disaster.

Lights began to wink on throughout the Upper Peninsula. As the prospective hub of early mining, Copper Harbor received one of the earliest lighthouses. Congress authorized its funding in 1847, and construction was complete by 1849. However, this first structure would not last long. A mere fifteen years later, an annual report submitted by the Lighthouse Board found that the Copper Harbor light needed “extensive repairs.” By the time the approved improvements wrapped up, the government had invested over $13,000 (more than $200,000 in today’s money) in creating a more enduring lighthouse around the original shell. Where once the light and the keeper’s dwelling had been separate structures, the renovation brought them into a single brick fortress. Research conducted by Fort Wilkins State Historic Park speculated at what had caused the initial deterioration–errors in design and location were unlikely, but shoddy building materials might have been to blame–but could not draw firm conclusions. No matter the cause, the 1866 renovation of the lighthouse cured what ailed it. The building that stands guard over Copper Harbor today is the very same one that ushered ships safely onward a century and a half earlier.

Strictly speaking, a lightkeeper’s job was not an easy one. Each keeper took responsibility for ensuring that the beacon remained visible in spite of gale force winds, driving rain, and the blinding blizzards that sometimes arrived during Lake Superior shipping season. If a storm descended on Copper Harbor and iced over the lighthouse windows, it was the keeper who hastened up the tower and defrosted them. It was the keeper who fastidiously cleaned the powerful Fresnel lenses that directed light to vessels struggling against the rolling waves, the keeper who faithfully filled the lamps with oil. Yet the keeper assigned to the Copper Harbor lighthouse enjoyed certain blessings that eased many of the difficulties of tending the station. Whole families called the light home during the navigation season. While the man of the house might be the one who wore the Lighthouse Service uniform and assumed official authority for maintaining the lighthouse, his wife often shared in the keeper’s duties on an essentially equal basis. She poured the oil, polished the lens, and cleaned the windows; she gauged the weather and provided information for the lighthouse log. The couple’s children played around the lighthouse, their voices filling its modest rooms; they learned, as well, alongside their parents and occasionally chose to join the Lighthouse Service themselves. Indeed, Copper Harbor lightkeeper Charles Corgan and his wife Mary saw multiple sons take up the responsibility of tending Lake Superior lights. Henry, with his own family, spent more than thirty years keeping the Copper Harbor light, right up until its automation in 1919; James and his wife maintained the Gull Rock light, located east of Copper Harbor, before moving to Ontonagon.

Yet while the lighthouse life, with all its challenges, had certain pleasures and perhaps romantic appeal in a place like Copper Harbor, other Lake Superior stations could not offer the same allure. Out in the middle of the lake–some 25 miles away from the Keweenaw Peninsula and over 40 miles from Marquette–sits Stannard Rock Lighthouse. Where Copper Harbor’s keepers could walk to a pleasant village for supplies and visits with neighbors, the crew of Stannard Rock had only what sundries arrived by boat and each other for company. Climbing to the top of his home, a man stationed at Stannard Rock looked in every direction and saw the blue carpet of Lake Superior. His quarters echoed with waves breaking around the station and with the voices of his three male coworkers. Families did not come to Stannard Rock: it was, in the parlance of Lighthouse Service men, a stag station. A photographer, capturing an aerial view of the station, gave it a more eloquent name: “cornerstone of loneliness.”

No lighthouse is placed without a purpose, and Stannard Rock’s is an important one: it marks a high, dangerous reef that navigator Charles Stannard documented in August 1835. Few mariners, quietly journeying down toward Detroit or north toward Duluth, would expect to encounter such a threat in the midst of the lake. Thus the Stannard Rock Lighthouse–after an arduous, decade-long process of testing materials, constructing parts of the light tower, and repairing damage incurred during each winter hiatus–came into being. On July 4, 1882, the lighthouse commenced operations.

That first year, recalled Lake Superior Magazine in a profile of the lighthouse, Stannard Rock taxed its crew: “The light was authorized three assistants, but six came and quickly went. After assessing the bleak surroundings, three quit the Lighthouse Service outright and a fourth made it a bare three weeks before quitting.” The Daily Mining Gazette, writing in April 1932 of the departure of keeper and assistants to Stannard Rock for the season, told the story of a challenging summer ahead. “For months, the four men [Wilbur Belonger, Louis Deroscher, Robert Bennetts, and an unnamed ‘new man from Flint’] will keep vigil on the lake, tend the light, receive signals on their short wave radio set and sound warnings in foggy weather for the benefit of mariners on Lake Superior.” To keep the station fed, and to fight the psychological effects of isolation, “each of the men will have one week off each month, at which time they will go to the mainland for mail and necessary supplies.” On an exceptionally clear day, the other crewmen working might look west and spy the Keweenaw Peninsula or the Huron Mountains on the horizon. Otherwise, their only reminders that a world existed beyond the lighthouse came later in the summer, when lighthouse-tending boats or fishermen ventured far out into Lake Superior. These first weeks of spring were too chancey a time for most sailors to risk the trip.

So the crew on duty polished the lens, filled the light, broadcast guidance, and manned their posts. They climbed the flights of stairs connecting all ten floors of the lighthouse–linking the cellar, pumps, sleeping quarters, eating space, and light–and played cards in their off-hours. Some men did well there: Lake Superior Magazine documented one keeper, Louis Wilks, who served for twenty years and passed upwards of three months “on the rock” without a mainland trip. His assistant, Elmer Sormunen of Chassell, also offered over two decades of service to Stannard Rock. Yet being so far away from community proved to be a greater cross than most men could happily bear. When the Coast Guard took over, according to a 2002 article by Donald Nelson in the Superior Signal, its administration found that the servicemen it assigned to Stannard Rock could generally endure but a single year there. Automation seemed the key to keeping the light illuminated and the shipping lane secure while preserving the well-being of the Coast Guard men.

The last year of manned operation was to be 1961. Tragedy marked that season, however. A gasoline explosion tore through Stannard Rock on June 18, killing thirty-five-year-old William Maxwell and forcing his three companions to flee outside to the deck. Propane and coal stored as fuel at the lighthouse created a massive, raging inferno. The men could not reach their radio, if it survived, and their mainland counterparts apparently failed to notice that the Stannard Rock light had gone out. A buoy tender, the Woodrush, making its biweekly run to the lighthouse found fire still burning and the survivors still clinging to the exterior two days later. Together, the lighthouse men and the crew of the Woodrush put out the flames. One victim of the blast needed hospital treatment; after ferrying him back to the mainland, the Coast Guard returned to Stannard Rock to light a lamp that would hold the station over for the remainder of the shipping season. Other than people investigating the accident and technicians who installed the automated system in 1962, no one would return to serve at Stannard Rock. The loneliest place in America grew lonelier still.

Where the light at Copper Harbor offered sociability and stability, Stannard Rock provided solitude and uncertainty. Living at the Copper Harbor lighthouse drew its young inhabitants into service; being stationed at Stannard Rock drove several keepers away. But this, it may be supposed, speaks to the nature of Lake Superior. The lake challenges. It entices with tranquil beauty and threatens with an unmatched fury. It calls to some and intimidates others. It is peaceful; it is mercurial. It’s home.

It’s hard to believe, but we’ve reached that time of the year when Michigan Tech excitedly welcomes new and returning students to campus. Another academic year is about to commence as students arrive on campus this weekend. Crazy, right?!

As with the rest of campus, the Michigan Tech Archives will welcome our own student library assistants back to the department very soon. We’re really looking forward to having our amazing student employees back on campus, summer always feels a bit strange for staff without them here. 

That said, this fall is going to feel a little different for us as one of our long-term student library assistants won’t be returning this year. Becky Daniels began working in the Michigan Tech Archives her freshman year in 2016 and just this past spring graduated from Michigan Tech leaving the Archives after four wonderful years. 

Due to the abrupt changes on campus in response to the COVID-19 pandemic crisis, our staff unfortunately did not get to give Becky a proper farewell and thanks for her years with us. So, for this week’s Flashback Friday, we’re honoring the amazing contributions Becky has made to the Michigan Tech Archives by devoting our flashback to her. Before she departed, we asked Becky to write up a little piece about her time with us and final thoughts as she embarked on her new journey.

My first day in the archives feels like a lifetime ago, though, in reality, it was just under 4 years ago. When little freshman me applied for the position, she never knew it would become my second home on campus or that it would be so hard to say goodbye now that I am graduating. I can still remember the first few times I ventured back into the stacks to try to find something and found myself utterly lost or having to fetch Allison or Emily to help me do something for the fifth time that week. It felt like I would never really get the hang of it, but, somehow, I still found myself looking forward to coming back for my next shift. To be honest, I still wander into the stacks to put something back or retrieve a box and find myself at a loss on where I was going and have to pester Emily and Allison all of the time- it just feels like a part of the job now! 

The position in the archives really pushed me to become a better, more rounded person. Very few projects I worked on required me to utilize my skills in calculus or physics- instead, they required patience, care, and attention to detail. Being an engineer is not the most helpful trait when you are on your fourth or fifth name on microfilm and you can’t find it anywhere on the slightly blurry newspaper pages or when Allison and Emily give you a “present”- an entire box of envelopes to be stamped. Instead, I had to learn to appreciate the quirky details on those pages and enjoy the time spent at the desk next to my friends with that ink pad and stamp in hand. I learned that even the most monotonous sounding projects had a bright side- from learning more about the local history to finding funny stories- that I may have taken for granted without these years in the archives. 

I don’t mean to make it sound like my time in the archives was all long, tedious projects. To be honest, while there were one or two that I was more excited to be done with than not, I was more than happy to do them. I had never really enjoyed learning about history in a traditional classroom, but I loved having the opportunity to interact with and explore history in a way that not a lot of people do.  On top of that, I gained incredible friendships with the people who worked down there with me. I always looked forward to coming in for a shift and getting to tell Allison and Emily what craziness had ensued in my life since the last shift. I can’t thank them enough for their support and love these past few years. Meeting new people was also a huge perk of the job- from patrons to the people who work with and around me. There are so many patrons that visit the archives with a story to tell or share their joy of finding something meaningful with us and it always makes the days exciting.

Some of my favorite projects from my time in the archives were the death inquests and the memorabilia collection. There were so many stories or cool objects we found while working on these. With these projects, too, I was given a lot of freedom to work at my own pace, make discoveries, and ask questions. I know I am extremely lucky for the opportunity to have the freedom I did to work and, ultimately, grow. 

From here, I am moving to Kalamazoo, MI to start a full-time position as an engineer at Stryker. While I am excited to be starting the next chapter of my life, I will definitely miss the archives and, most importantly, the people there. Luckily, I know this isn’t goodbye forever and I will be back from time-to-time to visit the archives and the people I am lucky enough to call friends. Thank you Allison, Emily, and the rest of the staff down in the archives. I don’t think my Michigan Tech experience would have been as meaningful or fun without you all.  ~ Becky Daniels

Becky, we can’t begin to thank you for your dedication and commitment to your work here at the Michigan Tech Archives; we know that your work with us will have a lasting impact on the countless researchers that will pass through our doors in the future for which we will always be grateful. Congratulations on your academic success at Michigan Tech and on behalf of the entire department we congratulate you both on the beginning of your new chapter at Stryker and your marriage tomorrow! Congratulations, Becky!

To the west of his lighthouse, James Corgan saw Lake Superior spreading before him like a deep blue sheet, roiled and rippling from a stiff, hot wind. The lake had moods that Corgan observed through changing seasons, watching ice creep up along the shore as winter approached and gazing out quietly over its glassy surface on a placid summer day. This afternoon in late August offered no peace, either on the water or ashore. When Corgan looked east from the lighthouse, toward Ontonagon, he saw a village being devoured by flame.

Ontonagon’s roots were diverse. The Ontonagon Boulder, a massive piece of float copper found in the area, helped to spark interest in Upper Peninsula mineral deposits and give birth to the Copper Country. In the 1840s and 1850s, a series of mines blossomed in the woods of the newly-established Ontonagon County. The Minesota Mine, forever cursed with an unintentionally misspelled name, became the most profitable of these early ventures. Countless others set out with hope in their copper prospects, ultimately to be repaid with disappointment. The village of Ontonagon, the seat of the county and well-placed on a harbor, benefited from the people and money that descended on the western Upper Peninsula, from their products that shipped out over the rolling waters of Lake Superior. A wooden lighthouse to safeguard vessels carrying copper out and bearing goods for mines and miners to Ontonagon arose on the lakeshore in 1853; a brick successor replaced it in 1866. For a time, until Houghton County’s mines began to eclipse their neighbors to the south, it seemed that Ontonagon County might be the mining heart of the Copper Country.

As mines like Quincy and Calumet & Hecla proved more prosperous, and as the mines of Ontonagon County encountered difficulties in turning a profit in the 1870s, a different industry emerged. Lumbering gained new prominence in the region, with the first sawmill opening in 1881, according to the Ontonagon County Historical Society (OCHS); a second mill, called Sisson Lilly, began operations in 1882. Both quickly found themselves eclipsed by a larger competitor: the Diamond Match Company. Diamond Match arrived in the Copper Country in 1884, seeking to capitalize on Ontonagon County’s extensive stands of white pine. By the mid-1890s, it had made quick work not only of much of the pine forests but of the other sawmills, forcing out of business or purchasing its regional peers. At its Ontonagon mill, workers produced as much as 100 million board feet annually, per OCHS, and the company, all told, provided work to almost a thousand local men. The town that began as a copper harbor became a pine port, thriving on Diamond Match’s products. Diamond’s slapdash forestry and storage of its timber, however, soon turned Ontonagon into a match itself.

The summer of 1896 began like most Upper Peninsula summers, vacillating between frost and heat. By late July, James Corgan’s faithful lighthouse logs noted a number of warm and breezy days. On August 2, his daily observations included the first signs of trouble: “dense smoke from forest fires.” The blazes out in the woods had not yet come near enough to the village to threaten Ontonagon itself, but Corgan’s log documented its steady march toward disaster. Smoke hung over the lighthouse on August 4 and overnight on August 10 and 15. A few cool and pleasant days offered a respite before August 22 marked the return of smoke. Corgan deemed August 24 “hazy and warm.” It would be the last peaceful day for Ontonagon for some time to come.

“Something awful has happened to Ontonagon,” wrote the Ontonagon Herald in its edition of August 29. “Where one week ago stood a prosperous village of 2,300 population nothing is left but blackened ruins.” Although nineteenth century newspapers had a penchant for the sensational, in this instance, the Herald did not exaggerate. Fire had smoldered, in the estimation of the paper, for weeks in the swamps along the Ontonagon River’s west banks. When the flames at various times had threatened the Diamond Match Company’s property and goods, the concern dispatched employees to fight them back. Mid-morning on August 25, seeing the fire creeping up on the western edge of Ontonagon, “the company had sent men over with hose to try and check its progress. The reports which came back to town were that it was not very serious.” But the stiff wind that James Corgan observed at the lighthouse whipped the fire into a frenzy. “Men who had families living on the West Side began to get alarmed for their safety, but went to work just the same when the mills started up at one o’clock.” They would not remain there long. The fire alarm racing through Ontonagon as the mills began their afternoon shift called the village firemen to battle the blaze and to realize almost immediately the futility of their fight. Like the crew of a sinking ship, they urged women and children to flee the area.

The homes and businesses of Ontonagon went up like the matches that Diamond produced. Its planing mill and sawmill were among the first casualties, followed by “the Bigelow house, a large four story frame structure.” This, per the Herald, convinced onlookers that they were in true danger. “Every person in the lower end of town who could get away [from] the flames went in the direction of Greenland and Rockland.” At first, some refugees tried to rescue a few treasured possessions or essential household goods. As they ran, blazing pieces of wood from burning buildings and trees rained down upon them. The smoke grew so thick that it blotted out the sun. To their horror, the people of Ontonagon saw houses further ahead of them on the evacuation route succumbing to flames. Hope for survival seemed to be vanishing as quickly as their town.

James Corgan could not abandon his post to flee with his neighbors. His vantage point at the lighthouse offered him a horrific panorama of the fire in Ontonagon. Shortly after one o’clock, he saw the Diamond sawmill–just a few hundred feet southeast–ablaze. Piles of lumber stored about the mill quickly joined it. Corgan had to act. The lighthouse was not only his workplace; it was his home. He had a new wife, Josephine, and several children from a previous marriage, at least one of whom still lived at the lighthouse. Harry Corgan, no more than fourteen years old, joined his father, Josephine, and the family’s hired girl to keep the ravenous flames at bay. The quartet doused the roofs of the lighthouse and its outbuildings with buckets of water to prevent them from going up in smoke. Although the Ontonagon lighthouse sat on the riverbank, “at times the heat was so intense,” said James Corgan, “that we could not obtain water from the river.” Scanty “drops of mocking rain” did nothing to abate the unfolding disaster. At five o’clock that morning, a vessel called the City of Straits had sailed into the harbor to take on a load of lumber, beckoned to safety by the lighthouse’s beam; that afternoon, the City of Straits and its cargo turned to cinders at the dock while the lightkeeper fought to keep his beacon safe. By the end of the day, the scorching sand had burned Corgan’s feet. He, Josephine, Harry, and the hired girl no doubt tasted smoke and for weeks dreamed of fighting an impossible inferno. But the lighthouse still stood on the banks of the Ontonagon River, its lens flashing far out onto Lake Superior as dusk fell.

At last, the fire exhausted itself, though the hot wind blew all night. Those who could sleep took shelter in farmhouses or bedded down with borrowed blankets in open fields. The next morning, the village of Ontonagon counted its losses. The Herald described a razing that seemed total: “the court house and jail, four churches, three hotels, a dozen stores, thirteen saloons, two newspapers, three school houses, the Diamond Match company’s plant, forty million feet of lumber, the large general store of this company [the Herald], the barge City of Straits, two iron bridges, Corgan’s opera house and many happy homes were erased from the face of the earth. It was indeed… woe sufficient to make the stoutest heart quail and bring tears to the eyes of the bravest men.” Among those men was James Corgan. “Went over town,” he wrote in his lighthouse log, “what a sight of devastation.” Remnants of the fire still smoldered throughout the village as residents carefully ventured out to see what yet stood. The Herald began to itemize the losses at residences and commercial enterprises, which ranged from household goods valued at several hundred dollars to Diamond Match property at nearly a million. The lumbering corporation was lucky to be insured for $500,000. Far too many others in Ontonagon found their names in the newspaper with the note “no ins” following it. They would have to rebuild from scratch.

Even more devastating than the destruction of the town was the human toll. Amazingly, only one person died in the blaze, a Mrs. Pirk whose age left her unable to flee in time. Although her family tried to help, the flames kept them from reaching her. Two days afterward, her body was found “about a block from her home… unrecognizable but for a small fragment of clothing attached to her body,” in the words of the newspaper. She was buried in a local cemetery. The September 5 edition of the Herald told of the emotional devastation faced by several parents who had lost their children just before the fire. Mr. and Mrs. James McDermitt’s infant daughter was being prepared for burial when the fire approached their home. Quickly, the grieving mother had her little girl’s body taken to the family parish, hoping the church would be spared. It was not, and the parents had no one to bury. Mrs. Leander Anderson, “a poor Finland woman,” walked the beach on the night of the blaze, watching the flames consume Ontonagon as she held her own child, who had died on August 24. When the fire subsided, she had nothing left but the clothes on her back and her child’s remains. The weight of such losses must have rested heavily on the McDermitts and Mrs. Anderson.

The Copper Country did what it does best in the face of disaster: it found its sisu and reached out helping hands to its people. A first tug, the Colten, chugged into Ontonagon harbor at 5pm on August 26, carrying relief supplies donated by Baraga County. People of Rockland took in countless evacuees; five families in Ontonagon whose residences still stood housed a collective 110 people. One milkman, Patrick Casey, who had faced heavy losses distributed his milk to those in town who needed it more. Julia Herbert, whose business at the Lake Superior House survived, “fed 250 people every meal furnishing them food out of her own supplies. She stood by the flour barrel baking for thirty-six hours till nature demanded her to rest,” the Herald wrote. “What a noble woman.” Donations of groceries, stoves, utensils, clothing, bedding, and building material poured in from towns and businesses across the Upper Peninsula, Lower Michigan, and the Great Lakes states. Relief committees paid rail fare for those who had families elsewhere and wished to join them, including Mrs. Anderson. Even the Diamond Match Company, which would ultimately choose not to rebuild and cast its workers into unemployment, provided funds to help ease the blow. And when a government representative sailed in on the steamer Amaranth in expectation of inspecting the charred ruins of the lighthouse, he saw it instead preparing to guide ships safely on their night’s journey.

Ontonagon survived. It takes more than fire, more than flood, more than financial devastation to keep Yoopers down. Whatever comes next, rest assured that the Upper Peninsula will rise from it, ready to fight another battle.

Want to learn more? In addition to the Ontonagon County Historical Society and the Ontonagon Herald, Volume 1. of “Ontonagon Lighthouse Journal” from Firesteel Publications and material from Lighthouse Friends helped to inform this post.

Margaret Fazekas welcomed the new year of 1913 as an ordinary teenage girl, one of hundreds residing in the Copper Country. She saw the year out as a symbol of a fight and the survivor of a near-death experience.

Labor disputes had occurred in the mining communities of the Keweenaw Peninsula before, but the strike that began on July 23, 1913 ushered in an unprecedented era. Following years of fledgling effort to organize disgruntled workers–dissatisfied with their long hours, low rates of pay, and other concerns–the Western Federation of Miners (WFM) took root in the Copper Country. The key to their sudden appeal lay, in part, in the introduction of the one-man drill. This new device allowed a single worker to perform the tasks that he had once done with a partner. To his employers, this meant fewer men to be paid for equal production, increasing profit and redirecting productivity. To the laborer himself, it represented a loss of the companionship and assurance that working with another man provided. Many mine accident reports documented the rescue of injured men from rock falls or other serious incidents by their partners. Although having another man present could not always prevent a fatality, laborers likely felt more confident in their survival when working in tandem. If nothing else, a miner operating a one-man drill could easily find himself lonely, stranded with his own thoughts and the overwhelming clamor of the machine for hours at a time. Taken collectively, the new list of grievances found appeal in the hearts of skilled and unskilled blue-collar workers alike.

The strike began with passion that spiraled into violence on the part of both pro-union and pro-company sympathizers. Calumet & Hecla, Quincy, and other mining companies ceased operations for a short time, banking on a supply of copper already processed and available for sale, as well as the assumption that tensions would cool in the weeks that followed. Strikers harassed and bruised up men leaving their jobs. James MacNaughton, general manager of Calumet & Hecla, enlisted the support of the local sheriff to protect C&H’s interests, and the Michigan National Guard arrived soon thereafter to ensure law and order. In the words of historian Larry Lankton, “an uneasy calm held over the mines in the coming weeks.” The calm lasted until the Guard began to withdraw in mid-August and as a group of recently-deputized men opposed to the strike and private security guards assumed additional policing responsibility. Some of the new deputies took their duties seriously and performed them well. Others blundered, spilling blood. On August 14, 1913, two unarmed men died from gunshot wounds following a confrontation at a boarding house in Seeberville, just outside Painesdale. Six deputies and guards hired from the Waddell-Mahon Company had been the ones responsible. The Seeberville deaths of Steve Putrich and Alois Tijan galvanized supporters of the WFM, and the tensions of the strike escalated.

A little over two weeks later, fourteen-year-old Margaret Fazekas was shot in the head.

Like many Copper Country children in 1913, Margaret’s roots lay overseas. On August 5, 1902, she arrived in New York City with her mother, Julianna (Julia). Julia gave her place of origin and that of her two-year-old daughter as Rudabanya, Hungary, a small village near today’s border with Slovakia. They planned to reunite with John Fazekas, Julia’s husband and Margaret’s father, at Kearsarge. It had been two long years of separation, and several children joined the family in the years after Margaret and Julia settled in Houghton County. A number of clues indicate that life in the Fazekas house, however, was not peaceful. In 1910, the census taker found John residing at 99 Albion Street in Houghton, then the address of the county jail. Margaret later stated that her father had abandoned the family in mid-1913. Reconciliation was a long time coming.

John’s departure left Margaret to help her pregnant mother look after siblings ranging from infancy to ten years of age. Her education had ended in the sixth grade, perhaps to assist with family responsibilities or to bring in a little extra money in the face of her father’s instability. The coming strike added another degree of turbulence to Margaret’s teenage life. She turned fourteen the same month of the Seeberville incident. One wonders what the future felt like to her on her birthday, with violence and anger seemingly around every corner of her community and her family’s financial situation bleak.

September 1, 1913 marked Labor Day, which had become a federal holiday less than twenty years earlier. The labor situation in the Copper Country had not improved. A number of men who had walked off the job in July felt that the time had come for them to return to work at the mines, which reopened. To compensate for the absence of strikers, companies like Calumet & Hecla hired men from outside the Copper Country. WFM advocates denounced the arrival of the imported men, whom they called “scabs” willing to break the strike on the backs of workers. A number of skirmishes followed, many involving pro-union women. Women–especially ones from Croatian, Slovenian, and Hungarian backgrounds–played prominent and vital roles in the early days of the strike in particular. Female supporters of the WFM marched in frequent parades and attended rallies. More ardent ones hurled rocks and insults at men walking to work. The wife of one union man even allegedly set fire to timber at the Isle Royale mine’s No. 1 shaft, according to files kept by Calumet & Hecla.

A band of women gathering near Kearsarge early on the morning of Labor Day, then, was nothing unusual within the context of the strike. That day, Margaret Fazekas joined them. “September 1 I went on picket duty with the other women,” she said later, according to transcripts of an inquest held before the United States Congress. “My mother didn’t send me out… some neighbors knocked at the door and they called me.” It was about five in the morning when the ladies arrived to ask Margaret to come along. As a relative of a striking worker, whose relationship to her she did not disclose to Congress, she agreed to join in the morning’s parade and, with her mother’s permission, stepped out in the fresh Copper Country air.

Margaret and her neighbors fell in with a group that eventually swelled to some two hundred participants, including a handful of other young girls. She found herself at the front of the marchers as they processed through Kearsarge, eventually passing by “the property road going toward the Kearsarge mine and the back road there.” Their sheer numbers effectively, though perhaps unintentionally, prevented the morning shift from reaching the Kearsarge. About a dozen deputies on either flank of the parade spoke up with a protest of their own. “They told us to go home for breakfast,” Margaret recalled, although “we weren’t doing any harm at all.” The women objected. “We said we had just as much–” Margaret began when telling the story to Congress before correcting and gentling her speech. “We can stay there just as well as they can. We weren’t doing anything at all. Some of the ladies told them to go for breakfast, and they turned back, and we thought they were going home for breakfast.” The confrontation seemed poised to end.

“But when they turned back toward us,” the teenager said, “they had the revolvers in their hands and they started shooting.”

Realizing immediately how dangerous her position at the front of the parade had become, Margaret turned to run. As she fled the fusillade of bullets, one deputy’s shot struck her in the back of the head, right below her left ear. “I don’t know anything afterwards,” she told the inquest. She collapsed, unconscious. According to historians Gary Kaunonen and Aaron Goings in their Community in Conflict: A Working-Class History of the 1913-1914 Michigan Copper Strike and the Italian Hall Tragedy, fellow marchers carried Margaret to “a little storm shed at the back of a neighborhood house.” There, physician Andrew C. Roche from the local hospital attended her and quickly called for an ambulance to take her to the public hospital in Calumet. For four or five days afterward, Margaret struggled to regain consciousness. Dr. Roche felt skeptical that she would ever return to her right frame of mind, if she even survived the harrowing injury.

Word of Margaret’s shooting rapidly spread throughout the Copper Country and across the United States. In its edition the next day, the Calumet News, which generally favored the mines’ interpretations of the strike, argued that evidence pointed to paraders being equal participants in the violence but conceded the severity of Margaret’s state and her pitiable status as daughter of “a widow.” Within two days, newspapers in Billings, Minneapolis, Natchez, and other towns had picked up the story. The Star-Tribune of Minnesota told its readers that Margaret’s wound would likely prove fatal. Indignantly, it noted that none of the deputies who participated in the shooting had been arrested. Outrage in the community about the grievous assault on a child eventually led to just one man, John Lavers, being charged for his participation in the “Labor Day disturbances” at Kearsarge and pinpointed as the man whose bullet had wounded Margaret Fazekas.

The legal consequences of the day were still to come. That first day of September, Margaret lay in a hospital bed, fighting for her life and likely to lose the battle. In Hancock, WFM members met with President Charles Moyer, who declared the morning’s actions nothing short of murder. As the week wore on, Dr. Roche assessed Margaret’s state again and determined that the best course of action was to operate. His instincts proved correct: the procedure started Margaret down the road to eventual recovery. “Dr. Roach [sic] said some of my brain came out,” Margaret told the Congressional inquest, describing the physician’s age-appropriate summary of her injury, “but he put it back in again and he took a bone out of it–a small bone.” His prognosis for her future mental abilities remained guarded, but Margaret proved stronger than her injury. Four and a half weeks later, despite all odds, she left Calumet Public Hospital and went home to Kearsarge. Early in 1914, she was well enough to testify confidently before the Congressional inquest, remove her hat, and show the assembled men where her hair had grown to cover scars left by the bullet.

Margaret Fazekas became a symbol and a point of rhetoric of the strike for both sides. To those unsympathetic to the union’s arguments and who found their tactics reprehensible, she represented the innocents maimed by violence they deemed the WFM to have sparked. For supporters of the strike, she stood as another example of unchecked abuses that the mines levied out on the Copper Country’s people. In December, when a grand jury declared that insufficient evidence existed to indict John Lavers, she demonstrated to newspapers outside the futility of obtaining justice and answers about culpability in the strike.

Her father’s absence, the strike, and her shooting led Margaret to grow up quickly. In July 1915, a month before her sixteenth birthday, she and Joseph Dorko, age 21, filed an application for a marriage license. They left the Keweenaw Peninsula, settling in New Brunswick, New Jersey by 1917. Other members of the Fazekas family soon joined them: Julia Fazekas and Margaret’s siblings all resided in New Brunswick as of the 1920 census and apparently spent the remainder of their lives there. Margaret and Joseph had two sons, Joseph and Stephen, and a daughter, also named Margaret. Their marriage may not have been a happy one, however: in 1940, the couple resided separately, and Margaret’s 1952 obituary did list her husband among her surviving family, although Joseph outlived her by more than twenty years.

The life of Margaret Fazekas was an eventful and tumultuous one. By the time she reached an age that we associate today with proms and college applications, she had left her native country behind, experienced the loss of an absentee father, marched in a labor dispute, survived a harrowing injury, and testified to the strike that shook the Copper Country. Her story is one of many that can be told of strong Upper Peninsula women enduring the unimaginable–and one that ought never to be forgotten.

This Flashback Friday has me, on a deeply personal level, feeling a little wistful and missing the daily routine of welcoming the morning, my colleagues, and the collections at the Michigan Tech Archives. I’m a creature of habit and one of my morning rituals was to say a quiet good morning to David.

For those familiar with our public reading room and the reference desk, they will recognize the picture featured today as it hangs proudly, and has for many years, on the wall adjacent to the main archives doors. Each morning I turn the key in the lock, cross the threshold, and as the heavy wooden door closes itself, I glance up at David to wish him good-morrow before heading to my office.

David, the precocious subject of this beloved photograph from May 1958, is a favorite of many archives staff members past and present. David Roche Murphy, a Keweenaw native and brother of Terence Roche Murphy (longtime friend of the archives), passed away in March 2017 after a life rich with travel and a love of nature.

Born of two families prominent in Calumet, Laurium, and Eagle Harbor, as a very young boy David found a swift and sincere love of nature, as evidenced by the photograph of him and a young deer ankles-deep in Lake Superior at Eagle Harbor. Having spent many youthful hours at the shores of the Big Lake it is perhaps of little surprise that David, after earning multiple degrees from Michigan State University and stints as a reporter and intelligence officer in New York and Southeast Asia respectively, found his true calling at sea. He spent most of his active career as a Senior Logistics Officer (Chief Purser with Commander rank) in the Merchant Marine. He served on U.S. Naval Service vessels and elsewhere in close collaboration with U.S. intelligence services from Southeast Asia during the Vietnam War, North Pacific waters during surveillance of North Korean nuclear weapons activity, and was an officer decorated by the U.S. Navy for at-sea support of the battle fleet in 1990-91 Operations Desert Shield and Desert Storm.

Upon coming ashore at last for his retirement years, David returned to the Copper Country where he found comfort in community, creative pursuits, and the great outdoors. He was a longtime volunteer with Little Brothers, Friends of the Elderly, read voraciously, and was proud to be a lifetime “Eagle Harborite.” His initial home in retirement was in Eagle Harbor where Lake Superior remained within sight and sound.

One of the things they don’t teach professional archivists and librarians in graduate school are the lively friendships you’ll forge with patrons and partners, nor the myriad of losses you will experience over the course of your career. I was grateful to be a guest of the Roche Murphy family at David’s Celebration of Life in Summer 2017 at Saint Peter’s-by-the-Sea in Eagle Harbor. I also take comfort in knowing that the Michigan Nature Association has dedicated “Mariner’s Preserve at Silver River Falls” in Commander Murphy’s permanent honor.

The current situation and the stay at home order has kept me from some of the things I love most about being an archivist, but I find peace in being able to take this time to reflect on why I find such satisfaction in the act of remembering, preserving, and sharing about the past. The stories we find in the stacks enrich us and make us who we are. The lives and memories of others remind us what it is to be human. As a native of the Copper Country and an alum of Michigan Tech, I take great pride and care to serve as one of several stewards and keepers of memory of this most magical place. I will never forget what it means to be a part of this, nor what it means to be home. And I will forever say good morning to our “boy with the deer.”

Author’s note: In 2018, we published a piece on three remarkable women from the Brockway family. The tale concluded with an allusion to Anna, the youngest Brockway daughter, and the promise that her story would be told on another day. That day is today.

Anna Brockway Gray believed in living boldly and without a moment wasted.

This, at least, is the impression created by the documentation left of her life. She did, she thought, she moved with great enthusiasm. She made choices and mistakes with decisiveness. She forged a path of her own in education, in medicine, and in publishing.

Of course, for those acquainted with Copper Country women, Anna’s determination was hardly surprising.

We have no official record of what February 1, 1851 was like at the tip of the Keweenaw. Likely, the day dawned like most Upper Peninsula mornings: cold, with a thick blanket of snow and the great hush of winter surrounding the Brockway residence. Nestled in the snug warmth of their home, thirty-four-year-old Lucena Brockway brought her fifth child into the world. She and husband Daniel christened their newest daughter Anna Medora, a name shared by a picturesque lake not far from their home. By name and by inclination, the newest Brockway would enjoy a deep and lifelong connection to Michigan.

Although the Brockways were pillars of Michigan’s northernmost communities, they also wandered. In those days, the Copper Country had just begun to boom; mines broke ground, flourished, faltered, failed. The family went where opportunity beckoned. Anna claimed the Northwestern Mine, where her father acted as agent, as her birthplace; she spent portions of her early years in Copper Harbor, in Eagle River, at the Cliff Mine, and downstate in Kalamazoo County, where the census taker found her and her parents in 1870. Anna became intimately acquainted with the roadways and waterways of the state, and perhaps the constant relocation helped to inspire a fascination with her homeland. As a young woman, she moved yet again to enroll in Albion College, where her uncle William Hadley Brockway served as an administrator.

Opportunities for women’s education beyond the offerings of local public schools increased in the mid-19th century, but Albion was still something of an outlier. Both sexes could partake in the degree-granting collegiate program as of 1861, an option available at few other institutions in the United States; the school also offered a preparatory curriculum for those seeking to ready themselves for further studies. A catalog from the 1859-1860 academic year asserted Albion’s convictions about women in the classroom: “the question of the ability of the female mind to contend successfully with that of the more favored sex has been too long settled to require discussion.” To the students of advanced classes, Albion promised “a thorough and systematic course of study; equal at least to the scientific course pursued in many of our Colleges.” Anna more likely than not attended preparatory lectures, based on a list of degree recipients published in 1910. If, by the time she arrived in the late 1860s or early 1870s, the curriculum remained comparable to that offered in 1859, her studies might have included trigonometry, algebra, chemistry, anatomy and physiology, logic, grammar, rhetoric, and history. The time at Albion helped to form an Anna Brockway who was ready to take on her greatest challenge yet.

The first woman received a degree from the University of Michigan Medical School in 1871. Dr. Amanda Sanford collected her diploma while male classmates showered her with spitballs to show their disapproval. Seventeen other women joined the medical course in the first year it had been opened to pupils of their sex. Emma Call, one of the inaugural female students, recalled that her peers were “naturally the objects of much attention critical or otherwise (especially critical) so that in many ways it was quite an ordeal” to study there. Most instructors treated the women fairly and with reserve, despite insisting that their lectures be conducted separately from those offered to male students. In chemistry class, however, instruction was coeducational, and certain men shouted and stomped their feet when women walked into the room. The “antiquated professor” who taught the course told “coarse, ribald stories” to his pupils, as Adella Brindle Woods recalled from her 1873-1874 studies. He “looked upon us women students as monstrosities.” Another instructor “was just and often said we were good students, always adding he doubted if we would ever become successful practitioners.”

The women showed how wrong his doubts were.

Anna Brockway arrived at the University of Michigan in about 1880 to follow the trail that Amanda Sanford and her peers had blazed. The medical school itself was in flux at that time. When Michigan had first begun to educate doctors, the course of study consisted of a cycle of six to nine months of scientific and practical lectures that each pupil experienced twice. In 1877, the medical school expanded its curriculum to include a three-year option, which became mandatory in 1880. Clinical rotations in hospitals and laboratory work enjoyed new prominence in these studies. Anna’s training as a physician likely mirrored the late 1880s curriculum presented by Michigan historian Horace Davenport in his educational history of the medical school. In the company of a handful of other women, she spent the next three years doing dissections, conducting urinalysis, studying tissues under microscopes, and attending courses on physiology, obstetrics, pediatrics, medical jurisprudence, surgery, and physical diagnostic techniques, among others. The years of hard work and diligent study honed her mind and sharpened her practice, and Dr. Anna Medora Brockway joined the ranks of physicians upon her graduation in 1883.

The new Dr. Brockway’s heart remained in Michigan, but her medical career took her to a different Lake Superior town. She hung out her shingle in Duluth, Minnesota, shortly after leaving Ann Arbor. Her pioneering place in Duluth soon attracted the attention of some of America’s most famous suffragists: Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Matilda Joslyn Gage noted her medical practice as groundbreaking in their 1886 publication History of Woman Suffrage, Volume III.

As her fledgling practice began to take flight, so did another new avenue in her life. She became acquainted with a local attorney, Willard Gray, and the two married in Superior, Wisconsin, on April 15, 1884. Five years later, they relocated to the Keweenaw to advance their professions closer to Anna’s home and her aging parents. A son, whom Anna and Willard named Perry Brockway Gray, was born in Lake Linden on November 17, 1889.

While Perry flourished, the Grays’ marriage rapidly disintegrated. Anna filed for divorce, citing cruelty on Willard’s part, in January 1900. Her parents had passed away the year before, and she and her son ventured south to Grand Rapids. By 1910, they had relocated again to Detroit, where the University of Michigan mailed Anna a copy of the University Bulletin bearing the name “Mrs. Willard Gray.” A letter back to the college, now maintained with Anna’s necrology file at the Bentley Historical Library, captured the doctor’s spirit and autonomy in her own words:

“I have just received the University Bulletin addressed to Mrs. Willard Gray. I wish to ask that the address be… as I wrote it, Mrs. Anna Brockway Gray. Another woman writes herself Mrs. Willard E. Gray. Moreover not even Mr. Gray ever wrote me in that way nor has any one ever done so. My friends would hardly know that I was meant.”

Perceiving in her own misaddressed letter a broader problem, and bespeaking her deeper opinions on how women ought to be known in the world, she continued:

“Moreover I would suggest that each lady alumnus be recorded by the name under which she graduated plus her married name. Mrs. Willard E. Gray would mean nothing to those who [were] with me at the University, but Mrs. Anna Brockway Gray would identify me at once.

Kindly make the correction.”

Anna lived another twenty years after sending that letter, and she filled them with the same sort of independence and keen intellect. She joined the Daughters of the American Revolution on the basis of her descent from Ephraim Brockway, who had served in militias at Saratoga and West Point during the war. As her marriage broke down in the 1890s, she had begun to write prolifically and to collect historical documentation of Michigan. Naturally, the Copper Country proved to be her chief interest. By 1926, the personal diary where she stored her compositions spanned over sixty-one volumes, a remarkable output for any author or diarist. She contributed extensively to “Michigan History” magazine and compiled reminiscences of her early days as a pillar of Copper Harbor. In the moments when she wasn’t occupied with her historical work, poetry for young readers came tripping lightly off her pen.

If passion alone could sustain a life, the world would not be deprived of great minds and vivid souls so early. Anna’s heart began to trouble her as she turned eighty. No doubt she noticed the problem early; perhaps she suspected the diagnosis herself, her medical training having become second nature. No doubt, as well, that she recognized when there was no hope. When Dr. Anna Medora Brockway Gray died on March 29, 1931, a life of independence and distinction came to a quiet end. She returned to be buried to the only place that made sense: to the Keweenaw Peninsula, to Lakeview Cemetery in Calumet.

A remarkable Brockway woman could not be laid to rest anywhere but the Copper Country.

In the Copper Country, we know the four seasons: almost winter, winter, still winter, and mosquitoes. All joking aside, Yoopers take our seasons seriously. We ski, snowshoe, and snowmobile in the winter–and in the spring. We turn our ski lifts into color tour rides for brilliant autumns and spend cold mornings in deer blinds. In the summers, we trek up Brockway Mountain on our mountain bikes, gather for evening concerts along the Portage, and listen to the waves lapping against golden-lit rocks as the sun plunges into a luminous Lake Superior at the end of the day.

Some of these activities are ones that our neighbors in Wisconsin or Minnesota might enjoy or hobbies enabled by new technologies, like snowmobiles or four wheelers. But there is one all-season pursuit very particular to the Copper Country, something that is timeless and cherished by residents, tourists, old, and young alike. This is, of course, the exploration of ghost towns and mine ruins.

As the ice begins to peel away from the frames of abandoned buildings and the snow reveals traces of workings that came to naught, Flashback Friday presents a selection of images by one local photographer who knew how to wander the Keweenaw’s ruins. J.T. Reeder had an eye for capturing family life, daily activities, celebrations–and, most of all, the wistful beauty of nature reclaiming the mining landscape.

They say food brings people together. A shared meal between friends or family can knit us together in the best of times and the worst of times; it can tell us about where we came from and our current situations. Right now, many folks are feeling very disconnected, both physically and socially, which is why we couldn’t think of a better post for Flashback Friday than one that highlights something that always makes us feel connected: food.

Copper Country, what are you cookin’ up for yourself and loved ones right now? While we sadly can’t smell or taste your delicious cooking, we want to see what you’ve been making at home that makes you feel connected! Dish it up and share away! We’ll get started with a couple of bites from our Van Pelt and Opie Library staff.

Erin Matas (Faculty Engagement and Research Support Librarian) and Cécile Piret

As a Belgian, chocolate is my core comfort. Sharing chocolate with my family during the 4 pm goûter is the bright light of my day. – Cécile Piret

Lindsay Hiltunen (University Archivist)

In these times of uncertainty and isolation, some of us turn to classic comfort food to fuel the soul and calm the heart. This dish is so special to me because it is one that I always made for others. Each time I cook it I think of the long afternoons cooking this slow cook dish, drinking wine with friends and family, blasting records, chopping veggies and sharing stories. 

Season with salt and pepper, then lightly coat with flour of your choice, then sear 2-3 lbs of stew beef (usually in two batches) in a big pot or Dutch oven on the stovetop. I use a butter and olive oil combo to serve as the fat to sear the beef in. About 4 tablespoons butter and olive oil to coat the bottom of the pot. You can add a little more to sear the second batch if needed.

Remove the meat, lower temp to medium high and add a bottle of red wine, deglaze the bottom of the pot to get all the good bits. Add meat back to the wine, add a quart of beef stock, 1 and a half teaspoons of ground cloves, 8-12 smashed garlic cloves (depends on how much you like garlic), 10 fresh thyme sprigs (or dry thyme is fine – not sure about conversion), two bay leaves, and salt and pepper to taste.  Then simmer the beef on medium or medium low (depends on your equipment) for three hours (first twenty minutes uncovered, the rest covered.) In the last hour I add a small bag of baby carrots (or chop up 6-8 regular carrots), 10-12 quartered yellow potatoes, and chopped mushrooms of your choosing. I like button or cremini mushrooms. In the last half hour I add a bag of pearl onions. Sprinkle with parsley or chives before serving. Enjoy with crusty bread and red wine, or all on its own!

Feeds a crowd or makes a lot of lefties for a couple and it tastes better the next day.

Allison Neely (Archivist)

While I would classify myself as an adventurous eater; I’ll always be a Midwestern girl at heart. The fact that I’m always that person scouting out the weirdest, wackiest food at the MN State Fair says a lot about my food preferences. That said, what could be more Midwestern than a dish containing meat and potatoes?! 

This Irish Potato Pie is a new recipe to my family and definitely a keeper. We pulled it out of the Internet ether to celebrate St. Patrick’s Day this year as a nice way to celebrate the day and enjoy some good old fashioned comfort food. Layers of golden potatoes, the saltiness of the bacon, and sweetness of the sauteed onion complemented the flaky puff pastry and the rich heavy cream drizzled above; making for a very hearty meal. Definitely one that will stick with you!

Chefs’ Notes

Times like this call for simplicity and creature comforts; for sharing knowledge and gifts with one another. We hope that these anecdotes from our kitchens and homes brighten up your day and give you some cooking inspiration. What are you cookin’ up this weekend?!

Stay tuned for our next installment of From Our Kitchens to Yours!