Centennial Mine

It was as if the mines simply got up and left that same day. Locomotives were left in roundhouses, skips were left half way up skip roads, work uniforms left in lockers, and machines left waiting for their operators to return. Such was the case at Centennial – where a rather interesting piece of machinery was simply left alone in the cold. A piece of machinery we come across one snowy January day some 30 years later.

Sitting on those snow-covered rails, our mystery machine seemed to be patiently waiting its return to the underground it called home. Only the loading door ahead of it was closed, and the collar house beyond silent and empty. It’s destiny now seemed to slowly rot away behind the collar house – another victim of a lost empire.

We made our way forward to the front of the collar house. Turning the corner we could see the monolithic rock house standing tall only a hundred or so feet away. From this angle (and this close) the building looked massive. It rose high above our heads and if we watched the clouds pass over it long enough we swore the thing was falling over on top of us. We turned back to the collar house, the front end consisting of one large opening. The opening had been covered by sheet metal, but something else was plain as day.

There are two types of rock underground – the type of rock that makes money and everything else. Copper may be more abundant here then anywhere else, but even here it’s a minority. Within the lodes that it calls home, Copper is scattered about in small pockets and thin veins largely outnumbered by the value-less rocks around it. In conglomerate lodes copper exists as pebbles. In amygdaloid lodes it was more like flakes. Mines were lucky to get a pound of copper for every 100 pounds of rock mined.

It was an odd feeling that washed over us as we approached the base of the Centennial rock house – almost as if we had been there before. Above our head sat a large cylindrical bin that once stored copper rock waiting to be sent off to the mill. (It probably still had some copper rock inside it today…) The rock would be dumped into waiting cars running below it on a pair of tracks. At the front end were a series of levers, sprouting out from under the copper bin like an iron weed. We had seen this all before

While the similarities between where we currently stood and the Kingston ruins to the north, there was one obvious difference. Here the impressive mass of the superstructure still remained above our heads. Probably a good 7 stories above our heads, the steel sheathed mammoth easily dwarfed everything else in the area. Its gray skin was bloodied by rust most of its windows had been shot out.

We passed the headframe and made our way towards the hoist building a few hundred yards ahead. Sitting in the gap were a pair of cable stands, the second a few dozen feet shorted then the first. Although seemingly not the most interesting artifact, the fact that we hadn’t yet actually seen cable stands that were still standing made them much more interesting. Until now the only part of these structures that we had seen were the concrete pilings in the ground.

By now it was getting colder, and we could sense the approaching storm. Moving away from the cable stands our gaze quickly turned to the tangle of metal and wood just outside the hoist building. It was some sort of electrical hook-up for high voltage power lines. It probably served to power the hoist sitting next door. It reminded us of the possible electrical equipment found at Gratiot that probably served the same purpose.

It was a bit of a walk to get out to the gray building hidden in the woods. We followed a graded rise out across a landscape that had become increasingly swampy and wet. We were sure that it once served the railway that once served the Centennial rockhouse behind us. Unfortunately it abruptly ended at a good ten foot cliff and showed no signs of continuing back up further along.

As the Copper Range railroad turns north from Calumet and heads out to the mines along the Allouez gap, it first passes by the town and mine at Centennial. As we follow the same route today – now a snowmobile trail – we pass by the the mine’s remains. In the distance we could make out the collar house to Centennial No. 2, a rather large structure used by C&H in the ’40s. Now its sits forgotten, its rock house long demolished and it’s rock pile completely hauled away