The No. 2 Quincy Shaft-Rockhouse: 9,240 Feet into the Earth

For over 100 years, men ventured deep into mineshafts to reach the valuable copper deposits of Michigan's upper peninsula. The copper that passed through the Quincy Mining Company's candlelit No. 2 Shaft in the 19th century might have become a button on the uniform of a Civil War soldier, a wire for one of the first telephone poles, or part of the early electrical grid. Who produced this metal and how did they live? What was it like to work underground?

The workers who settled in the mining towns of “Copper Country,” the Keweenaw Peninsula on Lake Superior, came from a variety of different ethnic European backgrounds, including Italian, Finnish, Slavic, German, Irish, and Cornish. Mining companies attracted immigrants to this sparsely populated area with its company towns, where there were houses, hospitals, libraries, and schools ready to be filled. Conflicts over this paternalistic relationship and ethnic tensions reached a boiling point in 1913, when membership in the Western Federation of Miners union swelled. That year, the unionized miners went on a famous and deadly 8-month-long strike that changed mining and the very social fabric of Keweenaw forever.

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-Kennymac