The mining town that burned to three buildings, then rebuilt by fall

On June 19, 1873, a forest fire swept over the young town of Michigamme and left almost nothing standing — one business and maybe two or three houses survived the whole place. By the first of September that same year, nearly every burned building had been put back up. The town was barely a year old and had already been destroyed and rebuilt before its first birthday.

Michigamme had risen fast because of iron. The Michigamme Mine — first known as Mount Shasta — opened in 1872, and a lumber-and-mining village sprang up around it on the west end of Lake Michigamme, the largest inland lake in Marquette County. Three hundred men were working the mine that first summer. Then came the fire, and right behind it the national financial Panic of 1873, which gutted the workforce: by October the mine that had employed 300 was down to 17.

That whipsaw — boom, fire, crash, all inside eighteen months — is the whole story of a U.P. mining town compressed into a year and a half. The ore eventually played out, as it did everywhere on the range, and the big mines went quiet decades ago.

What stayed is the lake. At better than six square miles and around 72 feet deep, Lake Michigamme is the biggest inland water in the county, ringed by forest and dotted with islands. The town that nearly burned off the map is still there on its western shore, smaller and quieter than its mining-boom self, watching over a lake that long outlasted the mine that made it.