M-26 Lake Linden to Hancock

Now tilting into the lake, this rusting old dredger dug up stamp sand dumped in Torch Lake after 90% of the copper had been extracted. New techniques after World War II for separating copper made this copper-rich sand more valuable than the 1% copper rocks mined deep underground.

This is an interesting stretch of highway that heads east out of Hancock then doglegs north at Dollar Bay up along the slender southern edge of Torch Lake, that odd tooth that widens as it approaches Lake Linden then heads to another slender waterway that provides access to Keweenaw Bay and Lake Superior. It was a curiously convulted yet crucial waterway for the big copper companies.This passageway allowed them to rail the dark rocks from the mines a few miles up on Keweenaw's spine down to the shoreline and ship them to the nation. All along the drive are scattered the modest roadside homes of employees who manned the processing plants.

The water provided another essential function. These chunks of basalt carted from above only contained 1-2% copper. They had to be crushed into dark sand before the copper could be estracted.

To produce the all-important pure copper ingot that could be profitably shipped, lots of water was needed to sift out the tiny portion in these rocks. Hence the location of these big copper plants along the lakeshore.

Along M-26 from Hancock to Lake Linden there were myriad processing plants—Lake Linden's were especially enormous. Passing Mason one gets an especially well-preserved view of the humble homes of those who worked at the end-point of the copper-mining process.

But along this stretch of M-26 you also get to see the scattered remnants of these copper-processing plants, none stranger, perhaps, than the remnants of the stamping plant pictured above. Perhaps even stranger is the complete disappearance of the enormous copper processing plants around the city of Lake Linden. It's hard to imagine that gargantuan factories ever existed here.

But they were here, and they did a lot. So much residerual "stamp sand" accumulated that they say 20% of sizable Torch Lake was filled.

Now what you see along the northern stretch is a long expanse of chain-link fence ending in Lake Linden park. The EPA designated this stretch as a Superfund Site.

Return to Lake Linden

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