Phoenix Mill

When the region’s premiere copper mining company – the Lake Superior Copper Company – folded up after only five years of profitless work along the Eagle River a new company was re-organized to take its place. Fittingly this new company was named the Phoenix, and like its mythical avian namesake would arise from the ashes of the Lake Superior Copper Company as a much stronger and vigorous mine. Its a mine that may not have been the region’s most profitable but managed to continue on for nearly three quarters of a century continuously re-inventing and adapting itself to ever growing challenges. These re-inventions and adaptations resulted in the continual evolution of the companies stamping facilities.

As the Eagle River makes its way north towards the big lake it turns and tumbles its through a narrow gorge beset on all sides by sheer cliffs and rocky outcroppings that makes the river’s journey much more challenging. Its a beautiful and rugged landscape that looks more like something you’d find out west along some Rocky mountain stream. The topography also makes the river hard to walk due to the scarcity of level ground along its banks, resulting in explorers such as ourselves to hop-scotch our way across the boulders and rocks scattered across the riverbed. Soon we had stumbled across our first ruins, sitting conveniently alongside the river’s edge.

With the mystery of the three-leged trestle still fresh in our minds, we continued on downstream towards what we hoped would be the old Phoenix Mill remains. Along the way, however, we ran across yet another odd item left in ruin along the old river bed. A concrete wall.

The industrial machine that was the Copper Empire was nourished almost solely by steam. From locomotives to electric power plants everything here was powered by superheated water – either directly or indirectly. Because of this you would expect that we would come across a great deal of evidence of those steam-generating facilities in our travels. But we don’t. Boiler house remains are notoriously low-profile, and the boilers themselves would have been scrapped decades ago. Thats why it was such a shocker to find what we did along the banks of the Eagle River – a boiler.

The discovery of the boiler indicated the rest of the old Phoenix mill had to be near by. In fact it was much closer then we had realized. Looking uphill from where the old boiler now sat we found ourselves looking up at the clean lines of a massive stone wall towering above out heads. Its placement perched along the edge of the hillside betrayed its purpose rather quickly – we had found the old mill. Or at least what little was left of it.

After our encounter with the previous series of stone walls littered along the banks of the Eagle River we were surprised to discover that we weren’t finished with the old mill ruins just yet. Just a short distance away from the mill foundations we featured last time were another set of rock walls. These sat further up the steep hillside and looked less like mill foundations as they did some general purpose building foundation.

After spending a good few hours trudging up along the river to find very little, it was becoming a ruin extravaganza here at the old Phoenix Mill site. First it was the old boiler, then the foundations to the mill itself, and then the stone walls of the mill’s boiler / engine house. Soon we found ourselves looking at yet another set of rock walls piled up in the thick woods. This one, however, was a little more mysteriou