Ex-Copper Boom Town Seeks Park Status

Copper mines turned this spit of land on Lake Superior into a turn-of-the-century boom town of stately mansions and free-flowing money.

Today, the industry is gone, along with most of the people and all of the wealth. Buildings are decaying, and each winter’s dumping of more than 300 inches of snow brings down another roof.

But the mining industry’s glorious past still seems the hope of the future for 35,000 people in Houghton County, a rural area encompassing most of Lake Superior’s Keweenaw Peninsula. They hope to freeze their communities in the past as a national historic park, a preserve of the country’s first mining boom and all its glory.

An inglorious preserve of the past may stand in the way. The proposed national park sits within a Superfund site of lead, chromium, mercury and arsenic.

For the last three years, the Environmental Protection Agency has been taking samples of chemical drums, mine tailings and slag piles left behind by a century of copper mining and processing.

The agency declared the mining areas of the county a Superfund site in 1986. In late October, the EPA made its first assessments of cancer rates: up to one death per 10,000 people for parts of the old mining territory.

EPA officials say their findings fall within the agency’s “acceptable” slot. That gives the EPA wide berth, including the option of doing nothing.

Rep. Robert W. Davis (R-Mich.), a chief backer of the Keweenaw National Historic Park, said the EPA findings are not enough to derail the proposal.

The National Park Service is less optimistic.

“A big reason for concern is we’d like to make historically significant areas available to the public . . . and they really need to be safe,” said Dean Alexander, acting chief of planning and environmental quality for the National Park Service’s 10-state Midwest region.

Despite their concern, park service officials say they have little choice if Congress orders the park, and Davis has secured $1.4 million to begin planning the $60-million to $70-million project.

For the money to be spent, Congress must authorize the park by the end of 1992. Rep. Bruce F. Vento (D-Minn.), who chairs the public lands subcommittee of the House Interior Committee, said he will not forward the authorization bill until the EPA gives Calumet a clean bill of health.

The stakes are high for Calumet, a village of 818 that was home to more than 32,000 people 70 years ago.

At the turn of the century, Calumet’s copper-flecked streets boasted an opera house, a bathhouse and a New England common. In the first century of operation, the Michigan mines produced more than $350 million in dividends for a stockholder group that read like the passenger list of the Mayflower.

But the copper boom soon moved west, where the ore was cheaper to mine. Most of the county’s mines were closed during the Great Depression, and the last one closed in 1970.