Taking Hannah to Utah--Marquette to Superior via Copper Country

Day two.  We woke up smelling stale urine, and I couldn't get it out of my nose most of the day.  However, that was really the only bad part of the day.  If I had to give a real title to the day, I would call it "Day Two--The Miracles of the Spirit of Elijah".

And even writing about planning the day, I was inspired by the spirit.

I had the feeling that I should leave time in the day for us to explore.  We were headed to the Keewenaw Peninsula, otherwise known as "copper country".  Probably 15 years ago, I found John's great-grandparents living there.  Aside from census records and their ship record, I had been unable to unearth anything else about them.  I'd been wanting to visit the area, because sometimes doing so, helps me "see" a family better.

Before we left the hotel, I looked up the census record because I knew it contained their address.  For the 50 years I find them on census records, they lived on the same street and within ten addresses.  I had asked Kathy years ago about them, and the only memory she had was of visiting her grandfather with her mother when she was young.  She remembered an outhouse, and him serving them moldy bacon.  Knowing he was from another country, I asked her if she remembered her speaking another language or having an accent.  In true form, she responded in like manner of how she has responded to the same question in regards to the other members of her family: "How should I know? I didn't talk to him.  I was a kid." (*cue eye roll*)

Two hours further north.  It felt like God's country.  Trees and hills and crystal clear water and nothing else in sight.  First we drove through Houghton which only survives because of Michigan Tech.  15 minutes north of that was Calumet, the town where John's great-grandparents lived.  We were headed 30 minutes north of there to the Delaware Mine, a mine that we could still tour.

Most of the copper mines in the area are closed.  Not just with a sign, but they have been flooded due to rain and filled in with dirt and rocks--there really is no sign that they ever existed--but Delaware mine has been kept open for tourists.  After a little safety demonstration about what to do and how to don our hard hats, we were off.

There was no pin in "Northville"!

The mine has nine levels, but all of them are flooded except the top one.  It was 100 steps down into the mine, but it's crazy to think that it extends another 300 feet below the surface.  It was first discovered when a man saw a piece of rock sticking out of the ground that had copper in it.  He just kept digging, and it became the Delaware Mine.  There is still evidence of copper in the green flashes of rock and in the sign that says "No prospecting".  Once again, I wasn't really dressed for the elements because it was 50 degrees under the ground which I imagine, on a hot day, is a welcome reprieve.

It's truly unbelievable to think of the labor those men exerted without electricity or advanced machinery.  Just pushing the tram full of rock took 8-10 men. Yes, PUSHING.  And to actually mine the rock, one man would hold the stake in the wall while two other men hit it with 12-pound mallets.  And what they brought up was 98.5% rock and only 1.5% copper.  That's a lot of work for very little gain.

See the copper?

 

We were underground for probably 45 minutes, just humbled at every turn at the realization of what people did just one hundred years ago to live.  Every worker in the mine was an immigrant.  Which leads to our first miracle.

When we came up, I asked the mine manager exactly how the immigrants got to the mine in the first place--I had been thinking about this the entire drive.  I assumed they took a train.  When I expressed this thought to him, he laughed and said, "There were no trains.  They all came by boat."

I'm sorry, what?

Yep, when they arrived on the eastern seaboard, they would make their way to the St. Lawrence waterway to come up to Lake Superior where they would be dropped off at the mining camps.  There were no roads or trains to take them off the peninsula.

This is still difficult for me to comprehend.  We saw a map of the copper town, built of the mining company.  There was a school, a store, living quarters, and the mine buildings.  That was it.  Just not having a McDonald's has felt isolating, but John's family lived in the same town for 50 years with no access to any other location.  It's mind-boggling.

Josip Jardas came from Croatia at the end of the 1800s, and his wife and three children followed a year later.  My only hope is that they were really poor in Croatia so that they would feel some hope at getting off the boat in Calumet.  Leaving behind family and a language seems like it would have been difficult.  I just don't know.

The remains of a mine building

I then mentioned that Johannah's great-great-grandfather had come from Croatia to work in the mines in Calumet.  The mine manager's wife then gave me the low-down on the C&H mining company, based in Calumet.  There were five mines all lined up behind the modern-day high school.  Josip would have walked to the mine each morning from where he lived, worked, and then walked back home.  

We then toured a few ruins on land and headed back to the car at which point she came out of the center, saying she had another thought.  Michigan Tech which is in Calumet used to be the Michigan Mining University, built by the mining company for the miners.  Michigan Tech now holds the employment records of the mining companies, and if I visited the archives, I might be able to find Josip's employment records.

What a genealogical gift.

We had planned on going to Copper Harbor lighthouse on the very tip of the Keewenaw Peninsula so we headed north another 45 minutes, but it ended up being a bust.  It's only reachable by boat so we just looked across the water at it.

I felt the itch to get back down to Calumet, so we drove straight there.  I figured Josip's house wouldn't still be standing, but perhaps we could visit the street.  Turns out, Cambria Street is very short, but at first I was puzzled by the addresses which included five digits (Josip at lived at 830 and 862).  However, one house had the five digit address PLUS the address of 870.  And a couple of houses down, there was a dilapidated house standing with part of the address 83_.  As Hannah said, it's crazy to think Josip and his wife, Anna, and their ten kids all lived there in what, at best, is a two-bedroom home.

Too, it gives better perspective for why John's grandmother left Calumet for Detroit and never looked back.  Not only did she leave for a better life, but she left behind her Croatian name of "Milija" and took the name of Mildred.  From what I understand, she wasn't a very good mother, and I wonder if that stems from her experience in Calumet.  Too, I wonder if she was educated in the schools owned by the mining company.  And did she get to Detroit via boat? So many questions.

I have never been able to find the death information for Joseph and Anna which is strange considering they died in the middle of the 1900s.  Joseph appears on the 1950 census record, but Anna is last seen on the 1940 one.  I had Hannah look up cemeteries, and the biggest one looked the most promising of the three.  It said it was open from 8-4 which in my experience doesn't usually mean there is anyone working there, but I had hope when we pulled in and there was a car next to the office.  Sure enough, I told the man working there that we were looking for some names, and while he couldn't confirm anything (I'm guessing it's a privacy issue), he handed us a piece of paper with three plots on them and said, "I think you'll find something there."  I snapped a quick photo of the very large cemetery map and off we went.

What a testament to the families who came, hoping to make it rich.  Italian names, German names, Croatian names, Irish names.

The first plot had just the name "ARDUS" on a large stone with no smaller stones.  Are there people buried there who aren't marked?

The second plot had three names which I knew were the oldest son of Joseph and Anna, his wife, and one of their children.

The third plot (and I was losing hope at this point) held another large family stone labeled "ARDUS" but it
was only when we got out and walked up to it did we see a ground stone in the corner that read

MOTHER

ANNA

1874-1944

Sure enough, I knew Anna was born in 1874, and I knew she died between 1940 and 1950.  It was her.

I bear testimony that the spirit of Elijah is so real.  It was sweet and overwhelming to feel a connection to this woman through a gravestone and yet there is was.  Hannah felt sadness, thinking of Anna being buried alone and rising in the resurrection alone as well.  I felt gratitude to her for enduring a very sad, isolated life so that my husband and my children could be part of my life now.  I don't know what kind of person she was, and it's not up to me to judge her based on her children and grandchildren, but she did her part in "multiplying and replenishing the earth" so that I could have joy in my posterity.

There were some plastic flowers in a vase in a neighboring grave, and one of the flowers had become detached.  I told Hannah to pick it up and put it on her great-great-grandmother's grave which she did.  Tears were shed, and love was abounding.

When we got in the car, I saw that we had an hour before the archives at Michigan Tech closed, so I called them to see if we could head in and get some help.  The woman on the line told me that all of the records had been digitized (having been done since I did my original research) and that I could just look them up.  So, sitting in view of Anna, we looked up Joseph's employment records, and there they were.  Another glimpse into the life of a man who had the courage to come halfway around the world in search of a better life.

It was inspiration that led me to give us time to explore copper country.  It was one of those genealogical miracles that I will remember forever.

We drove the three hours to Superior, Wisconsin (across the river from Duluth).  It was seriously the first sign of "civilization" we had seen in days, although that's a stretch.  There was only a Culver's in the area, and as soon as we left the area the next morning, we were back among the trees and lakes.