The 117th annual Central Mine reunion service has begun, bringing a 19th-century ghost town back to life for just one day of the year.
At this year’s event, traditionally held on the last Sunday of July, 163 people attended services at 9 a.m. and 11 a.m., consecrating a ritual that, for many present, began with their great-great-grandparents. Though the 38-acre Central historical site is open to visitors throughout the year, its surviving buildings are sparse, consisting mainly of restored miners’ homes and the 155-year-old church.
The shafts of light penetrating the church’s high windows offered a stark counterpoint to nearby mineshafts that once ran more than 3,000 feet below ground. These passageways led to copper deposits that made Central one of the many successful mines on the 150-mile-long Keweenaw Peninsula, the northernmost appendage of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, in the second half of the 19th century.
Here, surrounded by the vastness of Lake Superior, receding glaciers left massive caches of remarkably pure copper, a key ingredient in everything from cookware to cannons. Beginning in the early 1840s—several years before the discovery of gold in California in 1848—tens of thousands of people eager to take advantage of this largely untapped resource flocked to what became known as Copper Country. Many were immigrants from Cornwall, an English county with a long mining tradition.
“Copper mining in the Lake Superior country seems to be all the rage just now,” wrote the Detroit Democratic Free Press in 1845. “From Boston, New York, Pittsburgh and Cleveland, and many other eastern cities, there are constant arrivals … all making a grand dash at the newly discovered copper region.”
This “grand dash” resulted in a flourishing industry that endured into the early 20th century. The Keweenaw Peninsula “had the richest mines, the deepest mines, the most technologically innovative and the most profitable mines here,” says Timothy J. Scarlett, an industrial archaeologist at Michigan Technological University in Houghton. The area was “well known around the country.”
By the time white miners arrived in the region, its Indigenous inhabitants had already been mining copper for millennia. “The last glaciers receded about 9,000 years ago,” says Scarlett. “Almost as soon as they melted, people began arriving.”
According to Scarlett, recent scholarship suggests the area’s prehistoric residents excavated copper from shallow pits (Central itself was built on one such ancient site) and practiced metallurgy, essentially using fire to heat copper and then shaping it with handheld tools. “People used the landscape seasonally, much like [tourists] who rent summer cabins here today,” he says. “They came up in the summer to hunt, grow things and harvest some copper.”