CHAMPION

Region: Marquette Range

Higley's Saloon, long a colorful fixture for passing motorists looking north and down from U.S. 41, has been closed for some time now. But its vintage interior remains intact, so don't be surprised if it opens once more.

THIS QUIET VILLAGE straddling U.S. 41 is a pale shadow of the lively town here from 1867 to 1912. The difference: during that bustling era the famous Champion Mine was in operation.

Disguised as the isolated village of Tioga, Champion is known to thousands of enthusiastic readers of Cully Gage's Northwoods Readers, humorous yet utterly realistic collections of character sketches and anecdotes, based on life in Champion early in this century. The mines and logging had drawn together a disparate group of people, and telling stories about each other was the chief form on entertainment. In real life Cully Gage was Charles Van Riper, son of Champion's longtime physician. "Dr. Van" had come here to work as the company doctor for the Oliver Mining Company, then stayed after the mine closed - because he loved to fish and hunt, and he liked the freedom, responsibility, and challenges of being the only physician in a remote area. Retired from a noted career as a speech pathologist, Charles Van Riper started writing for his grandchildren what became a long series of stories, using the Finnish nickname for Charles, Cully, and his mother's maiden name.

"Our little village," he wrote, "consisted of two little settlements, one inhabited mainly by French Canadians and Indians down in the valley, and the other atop a long, steep hill where the Finns and Swedes lived. A straggle of houses and log cabins containing other nationalities lined the hill road that joined them." When Champion Mine was booming, the villages of Champion and adjacent Beacon grew to a population of 2,500. Now the entire township has under 300 residents, many of them of descendants of the Finns and French-Canadians who worked the highly productive iron mine.

Disaster in the form of a cave-in struck Champion in 1912, when "the ground shook, sidewalks cracked, and a dust cloud blocked the sun." A hole, a hundred feet deep and 300 feet wide, suddenly appeared and sucked in several homes. The Champion Mine collapsed and was shut down for good. By that time, mineshafts had penetrated over 2,000 feet into the ground, bringing up over 4 million tons of iron ore. The mine is southwest of town, just outside Beacon.

While some area workers commute to the Empire and Tilden mines to the east, a good many working residents are self-employed loggers. Four miles west of town Mead used to own the forestry office which managed 175,000 of the company's 675,000 acres of U.P. forest. This Mead yard was also a collection point for the most valuable hardwoods harvested by its contract loggers. These special logs, amounting to a million board feet a year, were resold to hardwood veneer plants. In recent years Mead sold its forest lands to a company called Plum Creek. But this Mead wood yard is now owned by the family-owned Longyear company of Marquette, which still uses it as a collection point for hardwoods. A mile away was a former office of Champion International, the U.P.'s other papermaking giant. Its chief forester here managed 90,000 of Champion's 500,000 acres of U.P. hardwoods. Much of that wood went to Champion's Quinnesec plant near Iron Mountain to make coated papers for the pages of National Geographic, annual reports, and similar glossy publications. But Champion International, after being swallowed by a coroporation called International and then International Sencot, has closed down that office.

Champion's chief claim to fame these days is as the "Horse Pulling Capital of the U.P." The last weekend of each June a contest at the pulling ground north of the highway attracts thousands with workhorse competitions, mud drags, and other festive events.

Today you can almost count Champion's commercial businesses on one hand. They're all lined up on U.S. 41 to cater to passing motorists as much as to the local population. There's a sporting goods store, a small grocery store, and Bernie's Garage.

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PLACES AROUND CHAMPION TO

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