Calumet

Calumet (and the surrounding communities) once supported over 30,000 people. Now they support less than 3000. While technically a village, Calumet could easily of been much more. In fact, walking down the streets and alleyways of the village you quickly get a sense of how metropolitan Calumet once was. The whispers of this legacy can still be heard along the streets and within the buildings that still stand today.

We continue our look at Calumet from a different angle. While most tourists and locals have often seen the town from the pavers along 5th street, or the wide roadway on 6th, few have ventured deeper into the village walls. Only those people who live and work along these streets know the darker side of town. While the facades are restored and beautified along the streets there is another side of Calumet.

Continuing our theme for the week, we take another look at the village of Calumet. This one, however, is different then the views we have been providing lately along the roads and alleyways on the ground. Here we take a more lofty view, from a vantage point a little south of the village.

Natural light was a precious commodity in building design before electric lights. Not only were buildings graced with large windows, but the basement as well had a wealth of window openings to let in light. Today, however, these windows are a place for heat to escape and are boarded up quickly.

During Calumet’s more metropolitan days, this was the first thing most people saw when coming into town. Before the automobile and the highways that carried them invaded the Copper Country, most people travelled by train. This is the Mineral Range depot, where thousands of immigrants made their first steps on their adopted land. From here trolley cars from the HTC would load up passengers and bring them three blocks down Oak Street to the hustle and bustle of 6th. Along with its sister depot at Houghton, this was one of the finest along the line.

At the very head of 5th street and the start of Calumet’s business district sits the Union building. Built in 1889 on land donated by C&H, this brick and sandstone building signified the goodwill between the company and its people. Its purpose was to serve Calumet’s many secret societies and fraternal organizations, most notably the Free and Accepted Masons and the Independent Order of Odd Fellows. The buildings name referred to the spirit of cooperation between these benevolent societies (and not to organized labor which C&H so despised).

Calumet was built up around a narrow north-south road lying just outside C&H property. We now know that road as 5th street, and by the end of the 19th century it was the center of the Copper Country. Up and down its four blocks sit once of the largest collections of turn-of-the-century mining town architecture in the country. While time and derelection has left it mark, there is still a lot of jewels to be found if you look closely. For the next couple of weeks we’ll take a look at thos jems – starting today with this beauty in the 400 block – the J.W. Isakson Building.

Very few tourists venture up to the north end of 5th Street. If they did, they would find sitting atop a slight hill a collection of old buildings housing a used book store, art gallery, and a few apartments. And if they looked up above their heads they would find a rather beautiful restoration of one of those old buildings: the Reding Building. Its original tenants unclear, it has since been divided up into apartments. While the retail space has been permanently covered, the upper facade still clings to its original glory.

The sign that still hangs out front says “Ben Franklin”, but the marquee at its crown says “M. Vertin”. This is the old Ben Franklin store on the corner of Elm, 400 5th Street. Now occupied by silk screening business Monkey Business, this old building seems to have a story to tell. Could this building have housed the humble beginnings of what would become the four story monolith of department stores on the corner of Oak and Sixth (otherwise known as the Vertin Bros Department Store)? Or was this just another Vertin in a long line of Vertins that settled the Copper Country? Either way, an interesting building once you take a closer look.

We now enter the 300 block of 5th Street during our facade tour. First stop here is this three-story beauty. This looks to be one of the first stone “blocks” along 5th Street, due to the prevalence of wood structures around it. I don’t know what was origianly here, but I know that when I first arrived to Calumet it was home to State Farm Insurance, which is why I refer to it as the State Farm Building. What’s most interesting about this building is how narrow it is, barely three windows wide along the face.