GAY

Region: Keweenaw Peninsula

Don Hunt

The vast expanse of rock pulverized into stampsand along Superior's shoreline dwarfs the hamlet of Gay. Stampsand is the residue of the tiny percentage of copper extracted from the dense rock from mines along Keweenaw's central spine. Vegetation can't grow on the stampsand, giving a visitor the feeling of being on a barren planet.

On an isolated stretch of the Keweenaw Bay's upper west shore, this hamlet, named after mining official Joseph Gay, has three distinctive landmarks:

• A towering 256-foot-high smokestack Its base 30 feet in diameter. The stack is one of the few remnants of a huge smelter here, where crushed ore was heated to extract copper for copper ingots. Ore was shipped here from the Mohawk and Wolverine mines.

The enormous smokestack that signals the approach of Gay for many miles around gives an idea of the scale of the copper smelter operations here. Before becoming a copper processing and shipping town in the early 20th century, it had been a nameless lumber village.

• The vast expanses of stampsand, n eerie sight along the Lake Superior shore just east of town: a vast expanse of dark gray tailings, the remnants of finely crushed rock after the copper had been extracted. The half square mile aarea so inhospitable that even weeds can't take hold.

• The Gay Bar is the big draw these days, a classic U.P. bar owned by Bruce and Christine Fountain. It's located in the old home of the stamping mill superintendent and became a bar in the 1930s after the mines, mill, and smelter closed and Prohibition

What makes the Gay Bar a cool place to visit is its remoteness and popularity among locals. Despite the many outsiders who visit it because of the name, the bar remains an authentic Upper Peninsula tavern.

was repealed. Some come just to buy an "I've been to the Gay Bar" T-shirt. The homemade pizza, starting at $7.50, is popular, and the most requested beer is . . . Old Milwaukee.

Broken windows now grace the old Gay school, its majestic presence incongrous in a place that today has fewer than 30 families. Once the population was over 1,000.

Identified now as an old miniing village, it was initially a lumber town that wasn't develeoped to process and ship copper until the early 20th century.

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PLACES AROUND GAY TO

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