The Egyptian obelisks over an Ishpeming iron mine

Most mine headframes are ugly on purpose — a steel skeleton built to hoist ore out of the ground and nothing more. The two that rise over Ishpeming are different. They look like Egyptian obelisks, pale concrete towers tapering toward the sky, and people drove out to admire them on purpose.

That was the idea. By 1919 the wooden headframes over the Cliffs Shaft Mine’s A and B shafts were rotting and unsafe. When engineers brought the company president, William G. Mather, a plan to replace them, Mather pointed out that everyone in town could see the things — so they might as well be worth looking at. He hired George Washington Maher, a Chicago architect of the Prairie School, who came back with an Egyptian Revival design: reinforced concrete, thirty-three feet square at the base, narrowing as it climbed. No other iron mine in America got headframes built to be beautiful.

Underneath, the mine was all business. The Cliffs Shaft ran about 1,358 feet deep and unspooled some 65 miles of tunnels into the rock — one of the largest underground iron mines Michigan ever had. Drilling first struck ore here in 1877, and the shaft kept producing until 1967, which closed the book on underground iron mining in the district.

When the digging stopped, the mine could have become another fenced-off hole. Instead the former owners donated most of the property in 1998, and the Cliffs Shaft Mine Museum opened the next year. You can walk the grounds among hoisting gear, ore cars, and a rock collection, with the two obelisks standing over all of it. They have outlasted the work they were built for by more than half a century — gravestones for an industry, except they were beautiful from the start.