Fayette

The custodians of historic sites are forever battling entropy. The park had just restored that stack and repaired those walls when we visited in 1981, but the place remained recognizably a ruin. I'm certain the roofs the park's subsequently added provide protection from the elements, are perhaps necessary, and may even help some folks visualize the original operation. But this version's more impressive. I miss it.

Negaunee's Jackson Mine was the first Marquette Range location to mine iron ore--it did so in 1847--and was a pioneer in many mining-related operations. The mine was named for Jackson, Michigan, home to the original investors. Besides financing the mine, those investors built the first northern Michigan iron forge, on the Carp River in 1849; they also built a blast furnace on the mine property around the same time. In the '60s they built this town. It's clear from the corporate history that Jackson Iron believed that ore could be economically processed in northern Michigan and shipped to market as either pig iron or a finished product. This would not prove the most successful strategy for selling Lake Superior ore, but the markets had not yet made that clear. The company survived for over half a century before selling their still-operating mine to the Cliffs , so their processing experiments can't be fairly characterized as failures. In 1861 the owners hired Fayette Brown, a Clevelander with banking experience, as General Agent for their company. He managed the non-mining portion of the business, mainly from offices in Cleveland, where he had other interests. He masterminded the stealthy creation of this iron village across from Escanaba on the shores of Little Bay de Noc, but mostly he managed the firm's everyday business of soliciting buyers and making contracts. The ownership clearly found Brown's agency satisfactory, as they retained his services until 1888. And, of course, they named this company town after him. Most Marquette Range mining companies were managed from Cleveland, so Brown doubtless exploited synergies which were unavailable elsewhere. He certainly found investment opportunities for himself, as he was able to supply capital permitting his son, Alexander Ephraim Brown, to found the Brown Hoisting Machinery Company, where he devised and manufactured the ship unloading machinery which dominated many ports for half of the twentieth century. Another son, H.H Brown, presided over an iron manufacturing firm which bore his name. Fayette Brown invested in many Cleveland businesses, and was widely mourned when he passed away, at the age of 87, in 1910. Brown lived a long and successful life. The iron village which bore his name was only a minor project in a career spent near the heart of the iron, steel, and mining industries. ================ Like most of my recent postings, this is the Fayette blast furnace as it looked in 1981.

Tom Friggens, long the State of Michigan's chief U.P. historian, likes to point out that Fayette was never fully abandoned and therefore not an actual ghost town. That fact, more than anything else, explains the town's survival. One of the striking things about Fayette is the century-old wooden buildings. That the large stone blast furnace survived isn't really surprising, nor is the persistence of the ruined company store. Those are sturdy structures. But Fayette's surrounded by Lake Michigan, and Lake Michigan's weather is pretty hostile to wooden construction. The hotel really couldn't be more exposed, and the nearby town hall and this office structure are nearly as defenseless. Moreover, several of the wooden houses, which are in the woods and enjoy better protection, have been reduced to their stone foundations. The answer is tourists. Soon after Jackson Iron abandoned the town, entrepreneurs turned the place into a vacation destination. Snail Shell Harbor is simply beautiful , and the not-yet-ruined blast furnace gave the "ghost town" an ambiance unlike anywhere else on Lake Michigan's shore. The salt box houses survived as vacation homes, the hotel as a hotel, this office as an office, and the town hall as an auditorium. Other, less useful, buildings were not maintained and fell to the weather's pounding. This photo also dates from our 1981 visit. At that time the buildings really were around a century old; now they're older.

A charcoal iron furnace consumes three main ingredients: Iron ore (of course), limestone, and a forest (to be reduced to charcoal). For Jackson Iron's purposes, Snail Shell Harbor was nearly perfect. There's a limestone cliff within sight of the furnace, forests surrounded the townsite, and Samuel Tilden's new-built Peninsula Railroad was delighted to connect the furnace with the company's mine. And the waterfront, as you see, was mere feet from the furnace. That, too, was a consideration. =============== Fayette State Park in 1981.

Around the time Jackson Iron built Fayette's charcoal iron village, the British iron industry closed down its last charcoal furnace. According to the British iron masters, charcoal iron was expensive and technologically obsolete; moreover the devastation caused by the method was considered unacceptable. What was different in Michigan? In June of 1981 I was halfway through my long-delayed senior year of college, and had just turned in a senior paper which I'd originally expected to address that question. But I soon discovered: * the answer was relatively obvious, * someone had already written that paper, and * I knew that paper's author. So I'd adjusted my focus, and spent spring term examining the business infrastructure supporting mining on the Marquette Range. That, too, was inspired by Fayette. Maria Quinlan Leiby's SUNY Oneonta MA thesis " Charcoal Iron-Making at Fayette, Michigan, 1867-1890 " asked my question, and concluded that America really was different. Forests were abundant, the patent-impaired American steel industry hadn't fully taken root, environmental concerns weren't nearly so prevalent, and (most important) the engineers running America's railroads preferred charcoal iron for making rail car wheels. (Evidently coke-fired iron wheels were more prone to fracture.) Others have since argued that Fayette and its Pennsylvania competitors were advancing the technology and had grown more efficient than the abandoned British operations. Maria was (is) a bicyclist, and we'd first met at a conference some years before. We'd occasionally ridden together, and I'd worked with her husband, another bike club president, on bicycling causes. I'd known she was a state-employed historian, but hadn't known she'd studied Fayette. It was a bit of a shock, but a pleasant one. Small world. ================ A slightly-related story, posted today on a dabbler's journal .

One last 1981 photo from Michigan's Fayette State Park.

Fayette's charcoal blast was a long-obsolete technology when it was built in 1877; the British iron industry had largely abandoned it a century before, and the steel industry's Bessemer/Kelly patent dispute had been settled for nearly a decade. I set out to research why Jackson Mining invested in old technology for my senior paper at Macalester, only to discover that Maria Quinlan Leiby, a friend from my bicycling days, had already written that paper. It's a surprisingly small world.

Fayette State Park, at the top of Lake Michigan. July of 1981.

This is Michigan's most famous "ghost town"--Fayette State Park. Taken from in front of the long-abandoned blast furnace. "Ghost town" in quotes to acknowledge that place--originally an iron-ore processing town, but far longer a tourist attraction--has never been fully abandoned.