Dim electric lights in faux lantern casings illuminate the abandoned copper mine in Michigan’s Keweenaw Peninsula.
“Take a trip with me in 1913, to Calumet, Michigan, in the copper country,” begins a Woody Guthrie folk ballad retelling the massacre of striking miners and their families by hired strikebreakers in the Upper Peninsula. In the backroads of memory, I could hear his son Arlo singing it. “I’ll take you to a place called Italian Hall, where the miners are having their big Christmas ball.”
“Dianne, we need to turn in here,” I said to my wife as we approached the town of Calumet. The lyrics seeped back to the surface of my memory.
* * *
Copper once was king of the Keweenaw Peninsula, the northernmost jut of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula into Lake Superior. The copper boom began in the 1840s, although Native Americans had mined the metal 5000 years earlier in cavities still visible on the landscape.
Annual production peaked in 1916, with nearly 270 million pounds of copper mined from the region. A slow decline set in after that, and by the 1960s most of the Keweenaw Peninsula copper mines had closed. Left behind were crumbled economies and a decreased population. Thus began the region’s gradual shift to tourism.
We engaged in some of the tourist activities. We sought out lofty views of Lake Superior. We had our pictures taken at the Keweenaw Snow Gauge, where our five-foot-something bodies were dwarfed by the average annual snowfall mark of 20 feet and the record high of 32. We visited shops in Copper Harbor, the peninsula’s northernmost town, established in 1843 as the copper industry took hold.
But then we went deeper. Literally, fascinated by the copper mining history, we pulled in at the long-defunct 1847-established Delaware Copper Mine for a self-guided tour.
After viewing a brief, explanatory film and donning hard hats, Dianne and I descended a 110-foot stairway into the uppermost level of the abandoned mine. Alongside the stairway ran old rusted rails that once hoisted copper and waste rock up to daylight.
Seepage from recent rains glistened, dripped, and trickled into the descending shaft, then disappeared into dark passageways. Electric lights encased in faux lanterns lit the lateral vein, but they were soft, subdued, and spread far apart along the passageway, giving off a light as wan and copper-colored as the hard-sought ore. They offered just enough light to peer into subterranean rooms and into cross-cut passageways.
Shaft entrances leading to the lower levels were barely visible in the shadows. They were topped with pools of water seepage that had filled the ten lower veins—the deepest descending 1400 feet—in the century-plus since the mine’s 1887 closure.
In 2012, scuba divers explored the flooded lower levels of the Delaware Mine. Their YouTube video shows old rails, support timbers, abandoned buckets, ore carts, ladders, and tons of rubble submerged in the passageway waters.
The mine’s temperature was a constant 43 degrees Fahrenheit. Encrusted patches of white fungi grew on wooden gates, stairways, and support timbers, the result of the damp air. Pieces of discarded rail and mining equipment lay along the passage, including a long, hand-cranked drill used for boring into the rock.
Signs along the passage explained mining procedures and work hazards. Dianne digested the information and moved along the passage more quickly than I. She eventually disappeared from view.
I was alone, then, 110 feet below ground, breathing a dark, musty air. Mildewed timbers propped up the rock ceiling above me, and water-soaked beams in the submerged chambers below held up the floor. I was haunted by the past. The silence was as profound as any I’ve ever known.
Eventually Dianne and I reunited, retraced our steps through the passage, and climbed the exit stairway back into the summer light. When we resurfaced, we passed the roofless ruins of the mining company buildings. Tall white-trunked birches growing within the abandoned structures had long since softened the memory of the brutal industry.
* * *
Ninety-one companies tried their hand at copper mining in the Keweenaw Peninsula, most of them unsuccessful. Worker pay was often tied to the mines’ profitability, and thus wages were typically low. The work was dangerous. An estimated 2000 workers lost their lives in various Keweenaw mines in a little more than a century.
Labor strikes rocked the copper mines across the decades. Meanwhile, in 1910 mine owners introduced a lightweight drill that could be operated by one man, not two. The loss of two-man teams not only cost mining jobs but further imperiled worker safety, as a pair could no longer watch out for each other.
By summer 1913, Keweenaw miners had had enough and went on strike at the nearby Calumet mine.
The strike dragged on through the fall and winter. Violence broke out immediately. The mine owners hired strike-breakers who shot and killed two striking miners. Refusing to negotiate with the strikers’ union, the owners hired “scabs” to reopen the mines.
By Christmas, the strike was in its fifth month, and miners were running out of resources. To raise spirits, the miners’ wives organized a Christmas Eve party for the strikers and their families in the upper floor of Italian Hall, a local gathering space that had been built by and for immigrant miners.
While children received Christmas presents upstairs, someone outside the hall yelled “Fire!” A panic ensued, with parents and children dashing down the stairs to the door, which was barricaded by strike-breakers and hired thugs. Seventy-three persons—more than half of them children—were smothered on the stairs. No one was ever arrested.
* * *
Dianne and I drove the streets of Calumet, looking for the site.
Finally we found it. Although Italian Hall had long ago been razed, the door’s fateful archway had been preserved. Behind it, visible through the doorway, sat a granite monument emblazoned with names and ages of the seventy-three victims. The youngest had been Rafael Lesar, age 2.
The Calumet mine finally closed in 1968.
“See what your greed for money has done,” the Woody Guthrie song concludes.
More information about the Keweenaw Peninsula can be found in Kevin Koch’s book, “Midwest Bedrock: The Search for Nature’s Soul in America’s Heartland.”
-- July 2026
The Delaware Copper Mine self-guided tour begins with a stairway descending 110 feet into the mine.
An encrusted gate blocks off a side vein of the copper mine.
Ruins of the copper mine buildings are now softened by the white birch growing within their foundations.
Rail carts with boxes attached to their frames were used to bring copper and waste rock up to the surface.
