The Cornish Pump, Iron Mountain's gentle giant

Iron Mountain exists because of the Chapin Mine — the richest iron mine on the Menominee Range, which gave up over twenty-seven million tons of ore and built the town around it starting in 1879. But the Chapin had a problem: part of its ore body ran beneath a cedar swamp, and water poured into the workings relentlessly. It became known as one of the wettest mines ever worked. The answer was to build a machine the likes of which America had never seen.

The Cornish Pump — patterned on the great pumping engines of Cornwall’s tin mines — was designed in 1890 by Edwin Reynolds of Milwaukee’s E.P. Allis Company and first fired up on January 3, 1893. It remains the largest steam-driven pumping engine ever built in the United States, and one of the largest in the world: 725 tons of iron standing 54 feet tall, swinging a flywheel 40 feet across that alone weighs 160 tons, lifting more than three thousand gallons of water a minute from over 1,500 feet down. It cost a quarter of a million dollars at a time when that was a staggering sum, and it kept the mines dry until electric pumps replaced it in 1914.

When the Chapin finally closed in 1932, the mining company gave the great engine to Dickinson County as — in its own words — “a relic for sight seers to visit.” Good call. Today it towers over the Cornish Pumping Engine and Mining Museum on Kent Street, a state and national historic site, and no photograph prepares you for standing under it. The museum is open seasonally; details at menomineemuseum.com.