Joel Dinda's photos with the keyword: ghost town

One last look--for now--at the abandoned iron processing town at Fayette State Park at the northern end of Lake Michigan. This harbor was once a loud and busy place on the edge of a wilderness, but that stopped over a century ago. It's survived, mostly as a tourist attraction, largely because of its beauty, and its interesting history.

Fayette State Park again. The Superintendent's House ("The White House") is on the hill to the left, where the boss can oversee the blast furnaces, which are just to my right. Snail Shell had everything Jackson Mining was looking for: A deep water harbor, large nearby woods for fueling the blast furnace, and (very) nearby limestone to use for flux in the blast operation. Not to mention, of course, a convenient rail connection to bring Jackson Mine's ore to the furnace. Fayette lives on, well over a century after the last blast, partly because of the ruined buildings, and partly because the location's just beautiful.

To the extent that Fayette had a central business district, this was it. The Town Hall and a salt-box house (set up as a schoolhouse, though that's not authentic) to the left, with the Company Store peaking through. Dead center is the Company Office, with the Machine Shop behind. That's the hotel behind the large lilac bush. In the distance, behind everything, you can see a bit of the blast furnace complex. Fayette State Park, Michigan.

Or half of the store, anyway; the building's attached to a similarly-deteriorated warehouse. The was the company store at Fayette.

When I first visited Fayette they called this the Opera House; now they call it the Town Hall. I'm not particularly convinced either name is right--or wrong. It was a multi-function building with a meeting room upstairs. Fayette State Park, Michigan.

130 or so years ago this was a dock, shipping iron ingots down the Great Lakes. Snail Shell Harbor, Fayette State Park, Michigan.

Snail Shell Harbor, Fayette State Park, Michigan.

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.

Not quite a ghost town, but nearly so.... Thurmond, deep in West Virginia's New River Valley, was long the busiest point on the Chesapeake and Ohio Railroad, but those days are long past and it's now a not-quite-ghost town. On any given day, you'll see a few trains rumble through, and a few railfans taking pictures. I've got all those pictures; you'll likely see more from time to time. A fascinating place, stuck in time. Photo taken in July, 1997.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

Fayette State Park, Michigan, 1998. The grey building was the Sheldon House when Fayette was an active town, and the limestone and brick building in the foreground was the machine shop. The Garden Peninsula's residents include a number of commercial fishermen, and Escanaba's Bishop comes by early in the summer to bless the fishing fleet. That's the event we're watching develop in this photograph. This picture works quite well in black and white, by the way; along with the horse-drawn carriages, it has an apparent authenticity which seems quite impressive. Perhaps I'll post that version, too.... Scanned from a negative; taken with my Nikon N90s

We're back in Fayette. Here (again) are the company store (on the left), the opera house/town hall (on the right)--and the hotel! When Fayette was an active town--mostly in the 1870s and 1880s--these buildings constituted the bulk of the Fayette "business district." The skilled tradesmen lived out on the peninsula (to the right), while general labor lived near the blast furnace (to the left). Everyone shopped at the store, and met for entertainment and governmental functions at town hall. The hotel--called the Shelton House--was both a boarding house and a host for visitors. For over a century, now, Fayette's been a tourist destination--a ghost town--and these buildings have survived largely because of formal and informal preservation efforts. A beautiful and attractive place which happens to be a significant historical artifact. The reason there's no background for this photo is that the buildings are on a relatively skinny spit of land. The photo was shot in June of 1981 from near the superintendent's home.

Still another picture of Fayette's Opera House and the Company Store, with the limestone cliff that defines Snail Shell Harbor visible in the background. This picture dates from the early eighties; perhaps 1981, but I think a couple years later. "Opera House." Hmmm. It would be better styled a community hall, near as I can tell; the town government (such as it was) lived in this building, as did one or more businesses. The second floor's a meeting room, where (among other things) visiting entertainers put on their shows. I call it the Opera House because the state park did when I started visiting the town; I'm not sure whether the residents shared the conceit. Camera: Minolta Zoom 110 SLR