Taken from the Youngstown Bulletin, October, 1968

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Michigan’s iron ore history goes back to 1844 when a surveying party under the direction of W.A. Burt noticed their compass needles were acting irregularly. A year later Joseph Stacey reported a very large ore deposit in the Marquette district.

While conducting a search in 1845 on the basis of Burt’s report, P.M. Everett stumbled onto iron ore that had been exposed by a fallen tree. Mr. Everett organized the Jackson Mining Company and two years later opened the first mine on what was to be the Marquette range. He built a forge nearby. The mine forge closed five years later.

On July7, 1852, the Marquette Iron Company, organized in 1849 to developed land leased from Mr. Everett, shipped six barrels of ore to New Castle, Pa. It was the first recorded shipment of Lake Superior ore on the Great Lakes.

The Cleveland Iron Mining Co., headed by Samuel Livingston Mather, purchased the Marquette Company in 1853. A dock was built at Marquette and a short time later 152 tons of iron ore were shipped to Shenango Furnace at Sharon, Pa.

Mining and shipping methods were crude in those days. Men and horses dug the ore out of the ground. Candles were fastened to the helmets of the miner’s heads. Therefore, they had to walk slowly to keep the candles from going out, and melted wax often trickled down onto their faces. Ore was hauled in wagons to the docks where men with wheelbarrows loaded it onto the vessel.

Because vessels could not negotiate the rapids at Sault Ste. Marie, the ore had to be unloaded, portaged around the rapids and loaded on another vessel for the rest of the trip down lake.

The Menominee deposit was discovered in1848 by Mr. Burt and his surveying party when the compass needles again began acting irregularly where an Indian found magnetic ore along the Menominee River. Prospecting didn’t begin until 1872 and five years elapsed before the first mine was opened.

First indications of iron ore in the Gogebic, youngest of Michigan’s three iron ranges, were reported in 1848 by Dr. Randall, a geologist.

Discoveries were made during the years that followed, but 36 years elapsed before the first mine—the Colby at Bessemer, Mich.—was opened in 1884. This was only a half-mile from the Peterson.

One of the leading men in the Gogebic discoveries was Dr. Raphael Pumpelly, said to be the first professionally trained mining engineer in the United States.

Born in Oswego, N.Y. in 1839, educated in Paris and at Freiberg (Germany) and with his doctor’s degree from Princeton, he served as Michigan State Geologist from 1869 to 1871.

In the fall of 1871, Dr. Pumpelly was commissioned to buy Michigan land containing pine, iron formation, hardwood and sandstone. Hardwood was very valuable for making charcoal and Lake Superior sandstone was in great demand.

One morning as Dr. Pumpelly climbed to the top of a high hill, his Indian guide Jingobenesic (War Eagle) pointed to a dense wall of smoke to the southeast. It meant a big forest fire.

While hurrying to there camp, two days away, where Mrs. Pumpelly and others remained, Dr. Pumpelly was met by a messenger. He brought letters and a telegram telling of a vast forest fire (which has gone down in history as "the great Peshigo fire") destroying villages in Wisconsin, some200 miles away.

The next day Dr. Pumpelly climbed to the top of what was later named Newport Hill in what later became Ironwood, to take another look at the wall of smoke.

He sat down for quite a while, thinking over some of the problems that plagued him. As he sat there, he noticed yellow stains in the rock. To him, they meant the possibility of iron oxide. Dr. Pumpelly decided then and there to take steps to claim the land.

At the land office in Marquette, Dr. Marquette, Dr. Pumpelly bought two miles of the range land. This area later became the Newport and Geneva mining properties. Fifty years later the Newport mine became the property of The Youngstown Sheet and Tube Company when Youngstown purchased the Steel and Tube Company of America. Dr. Pumpelly’s discovery didn’t make newspaper headlines, and neither did the Wisconsin forest fire which killed 1,152 people, except in that particular part of the country.

Newspaper headlines were captured by another event, which occurred some 500 miles southwest. It was the day after Mrs. Oleary’s cow kicked over a lantern in the barn and fire was raging through the heart of Chicago.

When the flames were finally extinguished, Chicago counted 250 people dead; 2,150 acres swept by flames; 17,000 buildings destroyed and property loss at roughly $196,000,000. That was the story that captured headlines in most newspapers.

Names of two men are linked with the discovery of the Colby, the first successful iron ore mine on the range: Richard (Dick) Langford and Capt. Nat Moore.

Born in Ireland in 1826, Dick Langford came to the United States and moved to the Michigan peninsula five years later. He was a prospector at heart.

"While others were accumulating wealth, I spent my time and what money I could get hold of in prospecting the minerals of this locality," said Mr. Langford shortly before his death in 1909.

"My labors have not brought wealth to others and me to the poorhouse. (Blind and penniless, Mr. Langford spent his last days in the Ontonagon County Infirmary.) I could have established my right to a quarter interest in the Colby mine, but I did not care to take such a step. I have never had a lawsuit, been arrested, or served as a witness, of juryman. In fact I have never been put under oath."

Never married, Mr. Langford spent his life as a hermit living in a hut on Gogebic Lake. As one historian recorded, "he roamed the forest like an outcast Indian."

Mr. Langford was one of the first prospectors in the Gogebic area. In 1868 he sunk a test pit some distance to the east of where the Colby mine later was located, but did not go down deep enough to strike the ore body.

In 1872 or1873, Mr. Langford said he discovered the Colby ore body, but did nothing about it.

Some 10 years later he showed some iron ore samples to A. Lanfear Norrie, of New York and London, who had come to prospect the Gogebic area. Mr. Norrie wasn’t interested in the samples, but Capt. Nat Moore, an unemployed mining captain, was.

Mr. Langford is to have taken Captain Moore to the spot where he pointed out the deposit. Mr. Langford said he was supposed to have taken Captain Moore to the spot where he pointed out the deposit. Mr. Langford said he was supposed to have a one-fourth interest in the mine—but didn’t get it.

Captain Moore denied Mr. Langford’s story and said he found the Colby deposit beneath the rocks of a birch tree that had been blown over by the wind.

The mine was opened during 1884 and 1,022 tons of ore were dug out, hauled to the railroad where it was loaded on flat cars to be shipped to Erie, Pa., via Milwaukee.

With the Colby opened and the ore body proven, one of the greatest land rushes of the north country began. Within a year, seven mines were in operation and scores of other sites were under option. Two thousand miners were employed between Sunday Lake and Montreal River.

Mining camps and mining towns sprang up—typical frontier mining towns with wooden buildings, wooden sidewalks, streets of slush and mud in winter and dust in summer—towns well supplied with saloons, gambling halls and other places of pleasure for prospectors, woodsmen and miners. Among the towns were Hurley, Wis., and Ironwood, Bessemer and Wakefield Mich.

Two fires destroyed much of Hurley, but each time the destroyed portion was rebuilt. By 1890, it had 58 saloons, 20 hotels, four oyster houses, three groceries, two druggists and one Prebyterian minister who soon left for a more promising field.

Flames also swept ironwood’s business district, but the town was built on higher ground, bigger and better than ever. It had 55 saloons, 16 hotels, 15 boarding houses and a Chinese Laundryman.

Six miles east of Ironwood was the town of Bessemer, built close to the Colby mine. It had 48 saloons, 18 boarding houses, 15 hotels, 5 restaurants, 3 grocery stores, 3 photographers, 2 jewelers, 2 newspapers, 3 doctors, and 6 lawyers.

There are many stories of tent towns that became thriving communities as ore mines were opened; as reports of gold brought an influx of prospectors and as mining stock—some of it worthless—was floated throughout the country.

Yougstown’s interest in the Gogebic dates back to 1886 when the Newport mine was opened on the hill where Raphael Pumpelly saw the yellow stains in rock in 1871—fifteen years earlier. In the late 1890s, the Newport appeared to be exhausted.

The late Alex D. Chisholm told how the Newport mine was given a new lease on life by the late Ferdinand Schlesinger.

Operating in the northern iron ore country, Mr. Schlesinger once dreamed of forming a great iron and steel corporation. Caught in the panic of 1893, he went to Mexico ad engaged in the mining business.

A few years later Mr. Schlesinger returned to the Gogebic, and with financial backing from the late Mark A. Hanna, purchased the supposedly exhausted Newport mine for $50,000.

Mr. Schlesinger retained J. R. Thompson a geologist to study the area. Mr. Thompson discovered a great underground longitudinal fault in the district, which affected iron ore deposits.

Mr. Thompson sank the shaft deeper and deeper. With funds running short, he prevailed upon Mr. Schlesinger to permit him to use a diamond drill at the bottom of the shaft and search deeper into the earth.

For weeks the drill reports were not encouraging, Mr. Chisholm, then a chemist in the mine’s analytical laboratory, said. Then one morning the drill foreman came into Mr. Chisholm’s office, shaking his head ruefully.

"Last night we hit a terrific water pressure that pushed the drill pipe into the shaft until the rods gave way," he said. "We’ve got the rods out, but now a lot of this reddish stuff is coming up the drill hole."

Excitedly Mr. Chisholm reached for the sample. His eyes flashed as he began his tests. A few moments later he exclaimed:

"You’ve hit ore, a rich pocket of red ore!"

It had been found at 1,400 feet. With this report, the shaft was sunk until it tapped the pocket.

In the years that followed, Newport shaft was pushed down to 3,200 feet. It produced 35,000,000 tons ore after the day it was sold to Mr. Schlesinger as an apparently exhausted mine.

Mr. Chisholm, who began working on the iron range immediately after graduating from high school to support his mother, younger brothers and sisters, rose rapidly in the Schlesinger organization.

Mr. Schlesinger expanded his holdings and in 1920 organized the Steel and Tube Company of America, which included the Iroquois Iron Company (now Youngstown’s South Chicago plant), Mark Manufacturing Company at Indiana Harbor (now Youngstown’s Indiana Harbor plant), a blast furnace and coke oven plant at Mayville, Wis., a tube mill plant at Zanesville, O., a plant for building engines (known as Tri-State Engineering Company) at Zanesville, a conduit tube and pump parts plant t Evanston, Ill., a spring plant and electric furnace at Kalamazoo, Mich., the Dunn Iron Mining Co., Rogers Brown ore Co., Elkhorn Piney Coal Mining Co., Christian Colliery Co., Redfield Coal Co.,Vinegar Hill Zinc Co. at Platteville, Wis., and the National Zinc Separating Co., with plants at Cuba City, Wis.

When Youngstown purchased Steel and Tube in 1923, Mr. Chisholm, then in his early 30s, was in charge of the company’s ore mining properties on the Gogebic.

A year later Pickands Mather & Co. of Cleveland took the mines as managing agent. Mr. Chisholm went with Pickands Mather; was transferred to Duluth in 1931 as assistant general manager; became general manager in 1937 and five years later became management partner of Pickands Mather.

Opened in 1886, the Anvil-Palms-Keweenaw mine was operated by Newport Mining Company and became a part of Steel and Tube in 1917. Its last shipment of ore was hoisted of Jan. 31, 1957.

The Plymouth was one of the very few open pit mines on the range. Opened in 1915, it was taken over by the Plymouth Mining Company in the following year. It produced 16 million tons of ore.

When the Plymouth was closed in 1952, mining equipment was moved one mile to mine another small pocket of surface ore. Named the Loomis, this mine lasted just a little more than a year.