Ghost Towns And Ruins · Volume 2
Michigan: The Copper Country and Watersmeet
Introduction
Native copper built the Keweenaw and then left it. The boom ran from the 1840s to the First World War, the long decline ran to 1967, and what it left behind is the richest concentration of dead towns in Michigan — and the only cluster where the towns still have standing buildings rather than foundations in the grass.
This is the trip to take first.
2.1 Central Mine — Keweenaw County
Access: open, with rules. Preserved by the Keweenaw County Historical Society. Off US-41 north of Phoenix.
A copper mine that ran 44 years and closed in 1898. The population figures tell the whole story of the Copper Country in three numbers:
Table 1 — tell the whole story of the Copper Country in three numbers
| Year | People |
|---|---|
| 1887 | 1,300 |
| 1905 | ~100 |
| today | 2 |
About a dozen houses still stand, and the descendants of the miners still gather at the Central Mine Methodist Church. This is the closest thing Michigan has to a ghost town you can walk through rather than photograph from the road — and the reason it survived is that people kept coming back to it.
2.2 Old Victoria — near Rockland, Ontonagon County
Access: open, with rules. Seasonal hours, donation-supported.
A restored miners’ village — log company housing, interpreted, run as living history. Restored rather than derelict is a different pleasure, and it is worth doing before the ruins rather than after: it is the best place in the state to learn what all those empty foundations elsewhere used to contain. Walk Old Victoria in the morning and Nonesuch in the afternoon and the afternoon means something.
2.3 Nonesuch — Porcupine Mountains Wilderness State Park
Access: open, with rules — state park, Recreation Passport required.
A copper town of 300-plus people from 1867 to 1912, with a school, a post office, stagecoach service, a boarding house, markets and a baseball team. What is left is masonry ruins, sealed mine adits, and the Little Iron River falls when there is water in it.
Getting there is easy, which is part of the appeal: a parking lot off South Boundary Road, about four miles from Union Bay; a half-mile trail in, just over a mile round trip, mostly level. No 4x4 required and no long approach — this is a site you can add to a driving day without rearranging it.
⚠ The adits are sealed for a reason. Century-old copper workings in sandstone; the seals are the only thing between the trail and a vertical drop.
2.4 Redridge Steel Dam — Stanton Township, Houghton County
Access: look, don’t enter. Parking area off S-554 (Liminga Road).
Built 1901, and believed to be one of only three steel dams in the country. Over 1,000 feet across and more than 70 feet tall at the middle, on the Salmon Trout River. Never demolished, never removed — a Historic Civil Engineering Landmark and on the National Register, still standing across the valley it was built to close.
🔴 This is the one entry on the whole list where the note is not a formality. A dam with generating works is the sort of structure Michigan treats as a “key facility” (MCL 750.552c), where the offence for climbing a posted fence is a felony rather than a misdemeanour — the two conditions being a physical barrier and posted signs. An unfenced, unposted derelict is not that. A fenced and posted one is, and the fence around an industrial ruin is exactly the thing people treat as decorative. Photograph it from the public side; it is more impressive from there anyway.
2.5 Freda and the Champion mill — Houghton County
Access: look, don’t enter. Continue past Redridge on Liminga Road; visitor parking at the end of Superior View Road.
Freda existed for one reason: to serve the Champion Copper Mill, which crushed ore with five large stamps until the mill closed in 1967. What remains is a large, unstable industrial ruin on the shore above Lake Superior — one of the biggest things of its kind in the state, and one of the least safe to be inside of.
2.6 The Paulding Light — near Watersmeet, Ontonagon County
Access: walk in. Free, federal land, no building to enter, and — the part that matters for this rig — you can legally sleep within sight of it.
Directions: from US-2 in Watersmeet, north at the blinker onto US-45 for 5.5 miles. West onto Old US-45 (dirt), follow the power line about half a mile to the dead-end barricade. The light appears in the distance up the cleared corridor — reported white, reddish-orange, or green, most nights, after dark.
Camping: Robbins Pond, a free Forest Service drive-in campground at the end of Robbins Pond Road — three cleared sites, a rock fire ring each, and nothing else. No water, no toilet. ⚠ Confirm it is still open before relying on it as the night’s plan.
⚠ The physical explanation is well documented — headlights on a stretch of US-45 seen straight down the corridor, demonstrated by student investigators with a telescope. That does not spoil it. Standing on a dirt road in the Ottawa at eleven at night watching a light that will not resolve is worth the drive whatever is causing it, and knowing the answer is better company than not knowing.
🔴 A correction worth carrying into the trip: at least one major campground aggregator lists Robbins Pond as being “in the Keweenaw Peninsula.” It is not — it is in the Ottawa National Forest in the western UP, roughly 100 miles southwest. Aggregator geography is not a source; check the managing agency.
2.7 How the loop goes together
Watersmeet and the Porcupine Mountains are the western end; the Keweenaw is the northern spur. A sensible shape is Watersmeet → Old Victoria → Nonesuch → Redridge → Freda → Central Mine, sleeping on federal or state land between, with the Paulding Light as a night stop on the way in rather than a detour on the way out.
Comments (0)