Quincy Dredge No 2

Published 2023-08-18

The Keweenaw Peninsula located at the northern tip of the Upper Peninsula of Michigan is affectionately known as the "Copper Country" due to the extensive copper mining that took place there. Years before the California "Gold Rush" there was a Keweenaw Peninsula "Copper Rush". Thousands of prospectors flooded the area in the early 1840's hoping to strike it rich. By the late 1800's the area was booming with miners and a full-fledge copper mining industry. Over 12 billion pounds of native copper has been mined from the region since mining operations first began.

Early processing of the copper ore was limited by technology and a great deal of waste tailings consisting of sand and crushed rock were generated by stamp mills and dumped into nearby lakes. As technology improved in the early 1900's, sand dredges were built to reclaim those tailings from the lakes for further processing.

The Calumet and Hecla Mining Company commissioned a sand dredge to be built by the Bucyrus Company of South Milwaukee, Wisconsin. It was named "Calumet and Hecla Dredge Number One." It was used to dredge sand near their reclamation plant in Lake Linden until 1951, when they sold the dredge to the Quincy Mining Company. They rechristened it "Quincy Dredge Number Two" and used it at their stamp mill located in Osceola Township, Michigan on Torch Lake. During a winter layup in 1967 it sank in the shallow waters. Reclamation processing of copper had already slowly become unprofitable and the Quincy Mining Company simply abandoned both the dredge and their stamp mill shortly thereafter.

Both the ruins of the stamp mill and the sunken dredge can still be found along M-26 in Osceola Township just east of the small town of Mason. This video captures forgotten remains from a bygone era of industry and prosperity in the Copper Country. A steel skeleton ghost from the past still haunting the shores of Torch Lake.

Footage shot using a DJI Mavic Mini 3 Pro
Video editing performed using DaVinci Resolve

The music "Pioneers" by Audionautix is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Artist: audionautix.com/