Gratiot mine

I remember the hidden town of Gratiot along US41 very well. Every time I drove north I would notice a small line of three or so houses sitting far back from the road across an open field. Once I even drove up that road marked “Gratiot Loc” and checked those houses out for myself. They appeared abandoned, yet the kids tricycle on the overgrown lawn, and the faded coke cans on the stoop seemed to suggest otherwise.

The concrete structure we approached was a more modern structure then what we have been accustomed to. Instead of poor rock and red bricks, this structure was completely constructed out of concrete. Two large concrete foundations, about twelve feet in height and six feet in width straddled the old rail line. Above the line, a concrete ceiling created a tunnel of the space below. The cap sported a group of large openings, probably used to dump the rock into the waiting ore cars below. Now however, only a small tree and various bushes took advantage of the openings for light.

Copper mining across the Keweenaw shared a uniform approach toward surface infrastructure. Specifically, every mine across the copper country had within it surface plant three main buildings: the shaft house, the rock house, and the hoist building. For contemporary explorers such as us here at copper country explorer, these three buildings become the main ruins we expect to find on any mine excursion. We are rarely disappointed.

Our experience with shafts from Osceola and elsewhere has given us a general idea of what to expect when we find one. Generally they are marked with a barbwire fence, either on old rotten wood posts or rusty steel stakes. Inside the usually failing and fallen fence is a large depression, about ten feet or so square. Inside of this depression is usually a good amount of brush and small trees.

Mining was a very dirty occupation. Working underground, drilling holes in rock, lifting and loading rock, dumping rock into skips; all this makes for some dirty clothes at the end of the day. To quell unrest with the miners wives at home, mine companies often built facilities that miners could use to wash up and change from (or to) their work clothes. Often referred to as “the dry” these buildings would be located close to the shaft buildings – as where we found dry for the Gratiot Mine.

For over a century, steam was king in the Copper Country. Fed from the millions of chords of wood growing across the Keweenaw, boilers bred steam to be used in almost every piece of equipment at a mine. Hoists, compressors, pumps, crushers, stamps – everything was powered by steam. Companies constantly built bigger and badder steam engines, reaching monstrous proportions and providing thousands of horsepower in the process. But soon steam faced a stiff competitor: electricity.

It is a standard practice for us at Copper Country Explorer to climb any poor rock pile we find, and the Gratiot pile would be no different. However, walking up to the looming man-made mountain gave us some second thoughts. It was much more steep then previous piles, and to make matters worse it was littered with debris. Hundreds of feet of coiled hoist cable wound up and down its sides possibly making climbing it a bit more difficult.

Now hoist buildings are generally easy to find. Usually they lie in line with the shaft and rockhouse, to the east / southeast from the shaft. To make it even easier, a line of footings for the cable stands that once supported the hoist cable would lie like breadcrumbs from the shaft to the hoist. So that’s what we did – follow the breadcrumbs. What the breadcrumbs led us to – deep into the wooded area behind the rock pile – was a ruin that looked like the hoist, but later we would find out couldn’t be.

The identity of the mystery building yet to be determined, turned our attention back to the goal at hand: finding the hoist. While we knew that the hoist had to be in the direction we were heading, the woods were become thick and impassible. Instead of fighting our way ahead we decided to take the easier route and head out to the road. While we say road, it isn’t exactly that. It is the same dirt two track that ran between the shaft building and the dry, now heading east towards what we hoped was the hoist.

An inside look at the Gratiot Hoist building in a 360 view from the hoist pedestal itself. Get the big picture of this modern hoist ruin by clicking on the image below.