Engine House

It was the ruin that sat at the far end of this level that was most intriguing. At first we thought it was a wall about waist high with a circular opening in its face. When we stepped up to it we saw that while a few feet high on our side, the opposite side dropped a good twelve feet into a building. The ceiling had collapsed at one point, or had been foreably removed. A frame of twisted and tangled rebar ran the inside edge of the walls. Noticing a doorway on the opposite side, we climbed down off the level to take a look.

Stamp mills required large amounts of water to operate, in the order of tens of millions of gallons a day. While some mills such as those at Redridge relied on dams to create large reservoirs to supply their water needs, mills such as Champion simply pumped the needed water out of the lake. This required a large pump, and a pump house to house it.

With the winter months killing off most of the vegetation around the ruins we were able to get much better shots of a few highlights from our last trip. First is this panoramic look at the pump house ruins, which were hiding behind a veil of brush last time. This building housed the steam pump used to bring water up from the lake to the top of the stamp mill. The angled concrete platform on the right (barely visible below the snow) houses the feeder pipe from the lake.

Sitting at the south end of the third level was this concrete building – a place we had found before during our last visit to the Mohawk Mill. But back then we were under the erroneous assumption that the building housed the mill’s pump. But this isn’t true, the mills pump house was in fact down by the mouth of the Tobacco River (which you can check out HERE). This building had to of housed another type of engine, and after checking out the Sandborn maps we knew what it was. This was the mill’s steam engine, which would have powered both the stamp eccentrics and the rest of the machines as well.

In addition to the smelting and refining operations undertaken at the Quincy facility there were additional requirements its infrastructure had to provide such as mechanical power, heat, light, and water. These duties were delegated to the smelter’s engine room – a sandstone building attached to the backside of the Cupola building. The building – more of a room actually – is one of the complex’s original structures built along with the Cupola in 1898. Since that time it has served essentially the same purpose, with only the machines and equipment contained within it changing over time. Today it remains in much the same state as it was left more then 40 years ago – providing what is probably the most intact and preserved collection of steam equipment in the Copper Country still standing in its original position.