Ontonagon

Tuesday, September 22, 2015

We ended up spending most of the day in their museum and touring the lighthouse.  Chatting with the museum curator and our lighthouse guide was so engaging, we just couldn’t leave.  So some interesting stuff about Ontonagon.  It’s initial claim to fame was a huge copper nugget, which currently resides in the Smithsonian in Washington DC,  weighs 3078 pounds and is over 3 x 3 feet in size.

The copper found in the UP was elemental copper, not ore, which is why copper mining took off in this area.  Problem was, it’s a stinker to get it to a place of transport.  Many of the mines went broke because although they could find it, they couldn’t get it to a road, river   lake, or railroad.  The terrain here is that rugged.

There is still copper in this region and mining companies know where it is. They will go after it if the price goes up.  Along some veins, the copper also contains silver.

The White Pine Mine was last to operate here employing about 800 people.   It closed in 1995.  Logging was also big and some logging continues today.  They had a paper mill here, employing 200, but it closed in 2009.  So 1000 jobs have been lost.  Population here in 1990 was over 6000, now its barely over 1500.  We were told it’s a nice place to live, but bring your own money.

Our 1 hour lighthouse tour lasted for nearly 3 hours and it was just the two of us on the tour!  The lighthouse was built at the opening of the Ontonagon River in 1899 to assist shipping from the White Pine Mine.  They had a problem with Superior building a sandbar at the entrance so they built a jetty.  The sandbar went away, but it then built up along the west jetty.  They have extended the jetty 3 times and as a result, the lighthouse is now back from the lake a 1/2 mile.  So it was decommissioned in 1963.  It was never electrified and used a mantle light burning kerosene (kind of like a Coleman lantern). The light was a steady white, no rotation.  It had a 5th order Fresnel, but the lens has been moved to the safer museum location.

^{This is the mantle lantern.  The whole assembly would have set inside the Fresnel lens.}

Our guide told us many interesting stories about several of the nine lighthouse keepers. There was only one keeper and his job went 24/7.  He was only allowed “cat naps” of 1 hour while on duty whenever the river was clear of ice.  One of the keepers was required to stand at the river entrance with a portable fog horn in foggy weather if the seaman could not see the light.  One time the keeper was out there for 72 hours.

Over the years the channel was maintained to about 25 feet deep.  Freighters used the channel mostly to off load coal.  A very interesting day.   

The sunsets around here are awesome.