Calumet, the town copper built

It’s hard to believe today, looking at quiet little Calumet, that this was once one of the richest places on earth. Long before any of that, Native people mined copper in these hills for thousands of years. Then, in the 1860s, a copper-bearing rock formation was found here, and the Calumet and Hecla Mining Company grew up around it into the single largest copper producer in the country — a Boston-owned giant that some called the richest metal mine on earth. It paid its shareholders more than seventy million dollars over the years, the equivalent of a billion today.

The mines drew people from all over the world. By 1900, fully ninety percent of Calumet’s residents were foreign-born — Finns, Cornish, Italians, Croatians, Slovenians, Swedes, and more, often unable to speak to one another except through the work they shared. They built a town to match the money: an opera house, grand churches, stone commercial blocks, all far bigger than a place this size would otherwise have. Much of that architecture still stands, remarkably intact, which is exactly why Calumet was chosen as the centerpiece of Keweenaw National Historical Park. The old Calumet and Hecla offices are now the park’s headquarters, and you can walk the historic downtown, tour the Calumet Theatre, and visit heritage sites that tell the copper story.

Calumet also holds the Copper Country’s deepest sorrow. On Christmas Eve in 1913, during a long and bitter miners’ strike, a holiday party for strikers’ families was packed into the upstairs hall of the Italian Hall when someone falsely cried “fire.” In the crush to escape down the stairs, seventy-three people died, most of them children. There was no fire. The hall is gone now, but a sandstone archway from the doorway still stands in a small memorial park on Elm Street, kept as a quiet place to remember them. It’s a sobering reminder that the wealth pulled from these hills was paid for, in the end, by the people who did the work.