Tomorrow marks the end of CCE’s fourth year of exploring the Copper Country, an event we’ve been commemorating for the last few weeks with a weekly look back at years past. Continuing that tradition we bring you a look back at our most recent year of exploration, a series of posts that most of you are already rather familiar with. CCE’s junior year has been rather exciting for me, as I’ve watched my little creation grow and mature. It was during this past year that I began to expand out of my comfort zone, and began to reach out to landowners, historians, and non-profit groups to help tell the story of the Copper Country.

Most notable of these contacts was my work with the Quincy Smelter Association and CCE’s in-depth tour of the Quincy Smelting Works, a massive 27 post extravaganza that combined my photos with detailed maps, drawings, and archive photos to create a rather immersive exploration series. In addition to my own exploration I also partnered with the Quincy Smelter Blog to create a simultaneous building-by-building exploration on both sites, worked with local photography Dave Clark to feature additional photos of the ruins, and hosted a dedicated thread over at CCF to the Smelter and all it represented. (whew!) It was a lot of work, but in the end I feel it has become the epitome of what CCE embodies: a collaborative effort to document and understand the history of the Copper Country. I couldn’t have been happier with the result.

Year four also marked a turning point in terms of readership. For years my readership had remained steady but without any significant growth, an annoying and unnerving pattern that more then once threatened to shut the whole thing down. Turns out a spammer had hacked my site and had placed malicious content into its code that forced Google to remove CCE from any Copper Country related searches. This in turn kept anyone from finding my site, unless by sheer happenstance. While finding this information out was in the end good news, the resultant fix required a large amount of work. Essentially I had to delete the whole site and start over, a task that forced the sites closure for nearly a month. But in the end all was still right in the world, and CCE began to gain in both readership and page views. Things have been looking up ever since.

Year four took a lot of time exploring both the Quincy Smelting Works as well as the Isle Royale Mine. We also took at look at the LaSalle, the Franklin Jr., the Phoenix Mill, Copper City, the Clark Mine, Ojibway, the Centennial Mill, Houghton, and of course the Delaware. Here’s a few posts of note:

The Communities of Calumet
Did I mention I love mapping? This was one of my favorite posts of the last year, where I map out the Calumetropolis and provide some insight into all the small locations and communities that made up the Keweenaw’s largest population center. It was a rather popular post, and a fun one to put together. I plan to bring its sequel to the pages of CCE next month – but this time with a look at the communities of Quincy.

Mine Machines: Air Compressors
Besides maps I’m also very interested in how things work. While I’ve been studying hoists for years, air compressors have always been second billing and warranted little of my attention. It wasn’t until I stumbled across the massive compressor house ruins at Isle Royale that I decided to take a closer look at these important machines.

The Engine Room
The Quincy Smelter provided over a month of great material, but nothing was as cool as what we found inside the old engine room. After over a half century of abandonment these great steam and electric powered machines were still standing and intact in their original positions. Fascinating stuff and easily the highpoint of the entire tour.

The Catacombs
Another great find, this time at Ojibway. A series of steam tunnels and manholes that sit abandoned under the forest floor, like some long lost catacombs of an ancient fortress.

The Smelter
Turns out the Library of Congress has more then a few old photos of the Copper Country, taken while the empire was at its peak. While I had featured these photos before, the library had recently updated the images to super high resolution. The result was some of the greatest views of the copper country that was I have every seen. I plan to feature another set of these great photos next month, completely labeled and annotated no less. Stay tuned!

The 300 Block (p2) – The Hall Building
This last year I also begun a new type of series – the street tour. These types of explorations were influence greatly by the great work done over at the Forgotten NY website (a personal favorite of mine), where a similar format is followed. For this first foray into street exploration I picked Houghton’s main thoroughfare. Future posts are to include various other streets from across the region, starting next with Calumet’s Oak Street.

Before heading off onto year five, here’s some closing numbers from the last four:

Total posts: 630
Total comments: over 3400
Total locations featured: 74
Yearly Page Views: over 137,000
Yearly Visitors: over 50,000
Total # of Images, Maps, and illustrations: 7000

Thanks to all my readers for making the last four years so great!