Joel Dinda's photos with the keyword: blast furnace

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

Fayette State Park's most important artifact, in 1981. Lake Michigan in the background.

Fayette State Park, Michigan, in 1981. The owners of Negaunee's Jackson Mine had a notion that it would be more profitable to manufacture pig iron in the Upper Peninsula than to ship the unprocessed ore down the Lakes. So they scouted around and found a suitable location on Snail Shell Harbor at the north end of Lake Michigan. This structure, the core of the Fayette operation, was a blast furnace. The furnace was intermittently active from 1867 to 1891, then was abandoned. For well over a century, now, the ruin's been the heart of a ghost town. A surprisingly well-preserved ghost town, actually, as long before it became a state park this village was a tourist attraction. The furnace was getting major restoration when I began visiting in the late 1970s, but by 1981 they'd restored the stacks and stabilized the deterioration in the rest of the structure.