“Everything has its limit - iron ore cannot be
educated into gold”
-Mark
Twain
Fifty million years ago a volcanic
range covered the western half of the Upper Peninsula of Michigan,
forming the Gogebic Range. The Pre-Cambrian Era produced some of
the oldest rocks on earth, the igneous and metamorphic granites,
gneiss and schists known as Laurentian granite and Keewatin
greenstone.
Fast forward to October 6, 1871,
Raphael Pumpelly, who would later become a professor of geology at
Harvard, sat on Newport Hill in Ironwood and discovered that the
rock he picked up was iron
ore.
Later more extensive geological surveys
confirmed that rich deposits of iron ore were only awaiting
exploration…the mining boom has about to begun.
The underground mining skiff and
equipment in front of you represent the importance of iron ore
mining to Ironwood and the Gogebic Range. The year 1885 saw the
first shipment of ore from Ironwood, approximately 14 years after
Pumpelly’s discovery on Newport Hill. Millions of tons of ore were
shipped from the Gogebic Range during Ironwood’s mining
operation.
The nearby depot houses the Ironwood Historic Society and
Ironwood Area Chamber of Commerce is on the National Historic
Registry. The Chicago and Northwestern Railroad depot was
constructed of Lake Superior Red Sandstone in 1892. More than one
million people utilized the depot over a span of 78 years closing
to passenger travel in 1970 and freight traffic in 1981. A vast
amount of mining history, artifacts, and mineral samples are
available for viewing inside the
depot.
Go inside and see if you can find the “Hematite” -
Fe2O3 that made Ironwood
famous.
Hematite:
(derived from the Greek word for “blood,” in allusion to its red
color) heavy and relatively hard oxide mineral, ferric oxide
(Fe2O3), that constitutes the most important
iron ore because of its high iron content (70 percent) and its
abundance.
TO LOG
THIS CACHE:
1) How many tons of ore were shipped from the
Gogebic Range?
2) Over
what time period was the mining
active?
To log this cache
e-mail me the
answer
HERE
.
Sources:
Ironwood Historical Society and the Ironwood Area Chamber of
Commerce