The Cliff Mine, where Copper Country began

When Douglass Houghton’s 1841 report set off Michigan’s copper rush, the first wave of prospectors mostly failed — they dug pits near Copper Harbor and Fort Wilkins and came up with very little. The boom needed a mine that actually paid, and it found one here, in what is now Allouez Township, at a place called the Cliff.

Beginning in 1845, the Cliff Mine worked a near-vertical fissure of pure native copper running into the rock below a tall cliff. It paid off spectacularly. The Cliff was the first successful copper mine in the Copper Country, and from 1845 to 1854 it was the most productive copper mine in the entire United States, pulling out tens of millions of pounds of copper and returning millions in dividends to its Pittsburgh and Boston investors. That success was the proof everyone had been waiting for — it showed the Keweenaw’s copper was real and reachable, and the rush that built Calumet, Quincy, and the whole Copper Country followed in its wake.

A town called Clifton grew up at the mine, but when the richest copper played out, the people left and the forest took the rest. Today Clifton is a ghost town and the Cliff is a quiet historic site — a cliff, some ruins, a cemetery, and interpretive signs along US-41 north of Phoenix. It’s easy to drive past, but it’s worth a stop: this unassuming spot is, as much as anywhere, where Michigan’s great copper story truly began.