John Jacobs received a healthy pay check from the sale of his interests in the Portage Entry Quarries, money he subsequently turned towards the establishment of yet another Keweenaw quarry. The year was 1892 and the sandstone market was at its prime. Jacobs – along with a group of Marquette investors – bought up some 400 acres a mile northeast of the town that shared his name. The company was the Kerber-Jacobs Redstone Company.

This new quarry was located a good distance inland from the shore requirring the construction of an inclined tramway to gap the distance. Down at the shore a thousand foot long loading dock was built out into the lake, protected by a series of wooden cribs. Up along the tramway the company built a series of log boarding houses, black smith shop and warehouse, which quickly grew into the town of Red Rock. At the quarry some 16 thousands cubic feet of stone would be cut out during the company’s first year of operation, making it the region’s second largest producer just behind the Portage Entry quarries.

By the turn of the century the Jacobsville region was home to a collection of three quarries – all but one of which was under the control of the Portage Entry Quarries Company. On the west was the old quarry (and town) of Craig which by this time had stopped producing. To the west was the rather impressive sized quarry belonging to the Kerber-Jacobs Company along with the town of Red Rock. And sitting down to the south was the massive Portage Entry Quarry and the towns of Jacobsville and Sandstone (sandstone sat to the east of Jacobsville but is not marked on the map above). Rounding the region out was the resort town of White City (over to the far west), where the White City Amusement Park was located. This would be the height of the Jacobsville region. By 1909 the sandstone industry had collapsed and with it the Keweenaw quarries and communities that supporting them.

But Jacobsville was not the only area where the red stone was mined. A sprinkling of other smaller operations sprung up along the Keweenaw where ever the red stone happened to make an appearance. The largest of these was located half-way between Mohawk and Gay at the small town of Hebard – originally known as the Traverse Bay Red Stone Company.

It was Charles Hebard that first began the Traverse Bay Red Stone Company in 1895. Along with the quarry and town the shared his name, Hebard also constructed an 8-mile long railroad connecting them to Lake Superior at Traverse Bay. The quarry was later leased by the Portage Entry Quarries company, which continued to use the quarry to supply stone to local mine companies for a few decades. When the stone industry faltered, the old quarry was then bought up by the Mohawk Mine which utilized the old railroad right-of-way for its new mine railroad – the Mohawk & Traverse Bay. In the process the line was extended to Gay and Mohawk and the old quarry dock was converted for use as the mines new coal dock.

And then there’s Incline. When C&H first built its Hecla & Torch Lake railroad down to its mills at Lake Linden the company utilized an inclined tramway to traverse the steep grade at Lake Linden Hill. Situated up near the top of the incline railroad sprung up a small town known as “Incline”, named after the tramway. Incline was also home to a sandstone quarry, known as the Incline Quarry. Today the old quarry has been converted to a reservoir to provide Lake Linden with water for fire protection. As far as who operated the quarry, I’m not exactly sure. I believe the quarry was operated by C&H itself, in order to provide building materials for its mine structures up in Calumet. Its location along the H&TL would seem to help support this.

In the map above you can make out the old H&TL right of way along with the incline itself. The town was a bit up the hill from both the incline and the quarry, just to the left side of the photo. Old topo maps don’t label the town but do show a church and other buildings clustered together west of the quarry. When the C&H RR was built, a direct route was used to scale the hill instead and the incline was abandoned. I believe the town and quarry were abandoned near the same time.

Some information for this post obtained from The Sandstone Architecture of the Lake Superior Region by Kathryn Bishop Eckert