AMASA

Region: Iron River, Iron Mountain & the Menominee Range

The wilderness village of Amasa (pronounced "AM-a-SUH"), in 1910 a Finnish iron mining and logging boom town of 1,015, remains a surprising place, even as its population has shrunk. Today its 365 residents are sustained largely by employment in the forest products industry. The area has a growing number of second homes and retirement homes, on Fire Lake, in town, and elsewhere. Many summer people spent their own childhood summers with grandma and grandpa right here, and continue to return all their lives.

The Rusty Sawblade downtown draws a lunchtime crowd.

Amasa is not a place where you'd expect to find a manufacturer of pro basketball flooring, or a well-known environmental consulting company, or a regionally celebrated musical group drawing on folk and classical music. Connor Sports Flooring uses specially dried end-grain maple with 26 laminations to make its flooring. White Water, the folk-flavored family quartet of Dean and Bette Premo, who started White Water Environmental Consulting here, is probably the best-known performing group in the Upper Peninsula.

Still, with so few people, it's hard to have a steady customer base to keep things going, given the economies of scale that drive the contemporary American economy. The Amasa Hotel, successfully revived as a bar/restaurant/hotel perhaps a decade ago, didn't survive a sale to less determined owners. Now it is closed and for sale again. It's essential for town life to have a place for people to meet and talk (or "Chat and Chew" as a Minnesota small-town café is called). Now social needs are served by the attractive new Rusty Saw Blade Bar and Grill, and over coffee at the Tall Pines grocery.

Thanks to the thoughtful owners of Tall Pines general store, deli, gas station, and motel, many everyday needs can be filled in Amasa, without driving all the way to Crystal Falls.

Steve and Vinnie Liscomb launched the Tall Pines Grocery plus deli and gas station 17 years ago. Vinnie wanted to start a business in Iron Mountain. "Iron Mountain doesn't need another store," their then-priest told her. "Amasa does." Tall Pines is a general store in the best tradition, filling the little niches, seldom profitable, that when not filled can make village life very inconvenient and depressing. These days it's difficult for isolated general stores to find distributors willing to deliver small quantities. The Liscombs feel fortunate to be supplied by Core Mark Fleming out of Plymouth, Minnesota.

Steve and Vinnie developed an adjoining motel. For awhile they also ran the sociable Pine Cone Café in a comfortable, fireside space next to the general store and deli. But that proved too much to handle. Now Vinnie makes deli salads and sandwiches besides selling breakfast pastries. There are a few tables where folks can drink coffee and have a bite.

The old Blomquist Building on Pine St. was a rooming house back when the nearby iron mines (Hemlock, Gibson, Porter, Red Rock, Warner) were still producing.

Amasa's energy is a tribute to the western Upper Peninsula's powerful magnetic pull, which reaches across generations to draw back progeny of miners, loggers, woodsmen, and frontier entrepreneurs. Dean and Bette Premo are a case in point. At Michigan State University, where they earned their Ph.D.s in environmental science in 1985, their professors were incredulous to learn that their promising graduates were moving to Amasa to set up a consulting business rather than going into academia or joining an established firm. But Dean had spent many happy summers here at his grandfather Ralph Premo's house. He loved hunting and fishing with his granddad and his father. A folksinger himself, Dean fondly remembered his father's stories of the dances and fiddling at the farm social hall west of town on Town Line Road in a neighborhood of Finnish farms.

Dean's great-grandfather, George Premo, was an Amasa pioneer in the 1890s. He had been something of a northwoods legend as a teller of tales, a marksman, and the proprietor of the Hotel Premo, a famous boardinghouse and bar in the logging era. (For the Field Museum in Chicago, George Premo shot 160 whitetails to provide the 16 mounted specimens still on view in its "Deer in Four Seasons" exhibit.) George's father, Jean-Baptiste Primeau, had come as a fur trader to the Menominee River valley in the 1830s. Another Premo ancestor is Queen Marinette, the famous Ojibwa trader at the Menominee River mouth.

Dean and Bette knew that to earn a living in Amasa, they would have to follow the established pattern of living simply, diversifying, and relying on many skills and trades. In the old days, miners gardened and farmed. Loggers' wives cooked in camps. Mill hands' and miners' wives took in boarders. As tourism grew, many local people became guides and started small resorts. And everyone saved money for the hard times. Even today locals work on their own houses - only outsiders hire work out. In his lifetime Dean's grandfather Ralph Premo was a tailor, made radios, ran a barbershop, and was a postmaster when he retired.

"We realized we might have to do just about anything to live here," says Dean. In addition to building up their environmental consulting company, White Water Associates, Dean and Bette began taking their music more seriously. "We were willing to guide fishermen, or to make music for anyone who would hire us - festivals, fairs, schools."

Things have worked out remarkably well for the Premos. White Water Associates has grown. And Dean and Bette's eclectic folk music group has thrived. It's now a family affair with their children, Evan and Laurel, developing into accomplished musicians and performers in their own right. Up to three Premos have been part of the Keweenaw Symphony Orchestra. They've recorded five albums, and given many concerts in the Upper Midwest. Evan now studies at the University of Michigan. (Their schedule and recordings are on part of their website, www.white-water-associates.com ) White Water Associates has grown by doing environmental impact statements, landfill and groundwater work, and educational programs for clients ranging from individual landowners to paper companies and foundries to Indian tribes, conservation groups, and local, state, and federal governmental units.

Dances are no longer held at the Amasa farm hall, but their spirit continues in the Second Sunday Folk Dance series held from October through April on Sunday afternoons at a church camp near Bewabic State Park. The Finnish fiddling tradition lives on, and this is a good way to participate in it. See the White Water web site for specifics.

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PLACES AROUND AMASA TO

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