Hollowed Ground: Copper Mining and Community Building on Lake Superior, 1840s–1990s (review)

In the 1840s, a few intrepid capitalists opened the first industrial mines on the immensely rich copper deposits of Michigan’s Keweenaw Peninsula, a narrow sliver of land that juts north into Lake Superior like a bear claw. Isolated from the outside world by rugged miles and deep winter snows, would-be captains of mining discovered that building a successful mine also meant building a decent town for workers and families. Reluctantly at first, but insistently in the end, the Lake Superior mining companies became the usually benevolent lords of the Keweenaw—at least until other forces challenged their dominion and sparked harsh retribution.

In a manner reminiscent of Anthony F. C. Wallace’s enduring 1978 classic, Rockdale, Larry Lankton’s story of the northern Michigan copper industry unites deeply informed technological history with sharply drawn social history. Hollowed Ground skillfully traces the ties that made the fate of the cities and mines of the Keweenaw inseparable for more than a century.

In the decades before electrical and chemical engineers usurped their crown, mining engineers were on the cutting edge of technological and scientific change. Lankton shows that Keweenaw claimed one of the grandest, Alexander Agassiz, the son of a celebrated Swiss naturalist. In 1871, Agassiz took the helm of the Calumet & Hecla (C&H), the biggest and wealthiest copper mine in the world. Agassiz ran the C&H for nearly forty years, though he lived much of that time in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he cultivated his reputation as an academic scientist even as he made his fortune as a corporate industrialist. Agassiz’s extravagant technological style demanded the biggest and best, and no more so than in his penchant for gigantic prime movers. As Lankton notes, by the late nineteenth century the C&H had “the most impressive array of steam engines found at any one American company” (p. 93).

Few other Keweenaw copper companies could afford to match Agassiz’s C&H, but most agreed with the need to build towns and communities if they were to succeed on the isolated peninsula. Lankton argues the companies “became community builders and paternal employers” from necessity rather than choice. Most, he suggests, were happy to later leave responsibilities like stores and housing to other entrepreneurs when they could (p. 175). Lankton admits that the companies could use their paternalistic powers to control workers and quash unions. However, his portrait offers an intriguing contrast to Thomas Andrews’s argument in Killing for Coal (2008) where Andrews finds that Colorado coal companies consciously sought to engineer docile workers with company housing and stores. Regardless, some of the most riveting passages in Hollowed Ground are Lankton’s account of the violent labor struggles of 1913–14 when company benevolence warped into a vicious determination to reassert control at nearly any price. As in Colorado, corporate victory left scores of men, women, and children dead, and soured labor relations on the peninsula for decades to come.

Ultimately, the decline of paternalism on the surface was symptomatic of declining ore supplies underground, as well as the growing competition from more efficient new copper mines in Montana, Utah, and Arizona. Perhaps one of the most innovative features of Hollowed Ground lies in Lankton’s careful attention not just to the rise of the Keweenaw mines, but also to their long and fitful demise. Like old soldiers, it seems, great copper mines never die so much as wither away. Many were done in by the steep drop in copper prices during the Great Depression. Even the C&H shut down for a time. But it rose again when World War II created a nearly inexhaustible market for copper. Lankton’s account of the entirely new White Pine mine, which began production in 1953, offers a fascinating coda to the book, an example of the limits of totalizing, modernistic planning applied to a mine and town carved out of...