The Quincy Mine, 'Old Reliable' above Hancock

Cross the Portage from Houghton into Hancock, look up, and you can’t miss it: a tall red shaft-house standing on the hillside, visible for twenty miles around. That’s the Quincy Mine, and for the better part of a century it was one of the great copper mines of the Keweenaw — so steady that investors nicknamed it “Old Reliable” for paying a dividend nearly every year for decades. From 1846 to 1945 the Quincy pulled almost a billion pounds of native copper out of the hard 1.1-billion-year-old basalt beneath these hills.

The numbers are staggering. The mine’s No. 2 shaft was driven down along the slanting ore body to over a mile and a half deep — at the time, the deepest mine shaft in the world. To haul rock and miners up from that depth, the company installed the Nordberg steam hoist in 1918: a single engine the size of a house, the largest steam-powered hoisting engine ever built, sitting on the largest reinforced-concrete foundation ever poured for one. It could reel in cable at sixty miles an hour. The men who went down there worked in heat and dark a long way from daylight, and the work was hard and dangerous; the copper that made fortunes was wrung out of real human labor.

Today the Quincy is preserved as a Heritage Site of Keweenaw National Historical Park and a National Historic Landmark, and you can tour it. The full tour takes you through the hoist house to stand beside that giant engine, then down a cogwheel tram — one of only a handful of cog railways in the country — to ride a wagon deep into the mine itself, a constant 45 degrees year-round. It’s one of the best ways anywhere to understand what Copper Country really was. Details at quincymine.com.