Michigan Hinderland

We drove up through the middle of Wisconsin and crossed over into the Upper Michigan Peninsula today. As we traveled northward, the farms of Wisconsin disappeared and we headed into forest. The feel of the land changed dramatically. Nothing like the the forests of the Northwest, however...is there anything like the forests of the Northwest? Our goal was a small city on the Upper Peninsula that is on a smaller peninsula of its own (the Keweenaw) that juts out into Lake Superior. A city named Houghton. This town has an Anderton connection and I, for one, was curious to see it. Grandpa Anderton was stationed here in the earlier stages of his training in WWII. As he had not had time to go to college upon leaving high school, as the War was underway, he was sent here for a period of time to take some college-level courses before continuing with his flight training. At the time, the college he went to in Houghton for his classes was known as Michigan College of Mining & Technology. It is now known as Michigan Technological University. We were able to find and drive around the Houghton campus, and took some pictures of what were surely the few WWII-era buildings. It has quite a large campus now, and I believe they are even Division I in hockey. We crossed the bridge to the other side of the canal\river that cuts through the Keweenaw (and Houghton and its sister city Hancock). This area, in fact the entire Keweenaw Peninsula that Houghton sits on, was the backbone of a huge and rich north-south copper deposit. In this area in the early 1840's, after the State of Michigan was formed and the Upper Peninsula granted to Michigan, the first "mineral rush" in US history took place - for copper. It was a thick flat vein that went at an angle into the earth and was one of the main sources of US copper from 1840 - 1945. It had some of the deepest mines in the world at the time. Although the mining is now over, evidences of its roaring past are everywhere. It began raining heavily, but we were able to visit one of the mines and learn about the techniques they used for pulling the copper out of the earth here......the scale of what was done is impressive even today.

After we toured the mine, we headed east along Lake Superior and stayed for the night in Marquette, Michigan.