MTU Archives This is a view looking southeast of the Putrich boarding house at #17 Second Street in Seeberville, the scene of a shooting during a labor strike led by the Western Federation of Miners in 1913. In addition to the residents of house who survived the shooting, this photograph demonstrates the little regard the Champion Copper Company had for its Croatian workers. The exterior walls of the houses in Seeberville were not so much as covered with tar paper to protect the interiors from Copper Country winds, and the windows were not equipped with storm windows.

The immigrants coming into the Lake Superior copper region, beginning in the 1870s, were not particularly welcomed. They were mostly eastern Europeans, who spoke unfamiliar languages, their clothes were different, they had strange and unusual ways. Most of them came from agricultural backgrounds and did not have even the least understanding of industrial work. And while the mining companies needed the workers, they did not particularly care for them, or about them.

When building blocks of housing, the three larger companies, Calumet and Hecla, Quincy, and Copper Range, selected sites based on ethnicity, giving location preferences to one group over another. For example, the Quincy Mining Company created Frenchtown, across the road from the mine’s surface plant, and the Irish neighborhoods, like Limerick, were closer to the mine than was Frenchtown. Toward the end of the 19th century when the company began building housing for its Finnish immigrant workers, they created the “Quincy Hillside Addition,” which was located on poor, rocky ground on the side of the bluff rising from Hancock, over a mile away from the mine. The company also created its Swedetown some two miles from the mine, ridiculously long walks for men who faced 10-12 hour shifts after reaching the mine.

Calumet and Hecla also divided its housing clusters by ethnicity, and like Quincy, built their Swedetown over a mile from the mine.

At the Champion Mine, the company constructed shoddy housing for its Croatian workers, called Seeberville. The company truly made a statement when they did not even bother to cover the exterior walls with siding or even tarpaper to protect the residents from winter winds. Seeberville was set off from the neighborhood of Painesdale where the Croatian residents could see the Painesdale residents of different groups enjoying much better housing and yards.

It did not take the members of these new ethnic groups long to discover that they were, indeed, viewed differently from the other people already in the Copper Range. Finns, the first of the eastern European ethnic groups to arrive in large numbers, received much discrimination.

When hired by mining companies, Finns were given the lowest-paying, and highest-demanding jobs, whether they began as trammers, underground laborers, surface laborers. As Charles K. Hyde pointed out in his 1986 journal article, Undercover and Underground: Labor Spies and Mine Management in the Early Twentieth Century, because of the language barriers and culture, newcomers like the Finns were relegated to these “unattractive jobs,” while the earlier generations of immigrants dominated mining, the skilled trades, and managerial posts. Although seldom able to prove it, mine managers often assigned blame for things that wrong on the workers.

In 1884, a devastating fire broke out underground at C&H. The Mines Handbook stated that:

“The rock carrying native metal cannot burn, like sulphide ore, but the old timbering eventually becomes nearly as inflammable as tinder.” Although never proven, management blamed the fire on disgruntled workers.

In fact, C & H suffered five fires between 1884 and 1900, all of which the Mines Handbook reported were of “mysterious origin, and there seems reason for suspecting incendiarism.”

The Annual Report of the State of Michigan Mine and Mineral Statistics for 1889, published on April 10 of that year, reported that a fire that began on Nov. 29, 1888 in the Calumet No. 3 Shaft on the Sixth Level, stopping all production in the C & H mine proper, but mining was continued in the South Hecla, in what was called the “Black Hills Mine.” Eight men were killed in the fire.

“As to the origin of the fire,” wrote Mineral Commissioner Charles D. Lawton (not the same Charles Lawton who managed Quincy) in his report, “the chief officers of the company declare that it was set on fire, and a reward of $10,000 is offered for the apprehension and conviction of the perpetrator of the crime.” The reward was never claimed, and probably with reason:

“The majority of mining men, I think, are of the opinion that the fire resulted from the friction of the rollers in the shaft,” Lawton wrote. “There is a good deal of movement in the ground; it swells and expands, and pinches the timbers, causing the shafts to become smaller, requiring that they be constantly trimmed, etc. The tracks get displaced slightly, and tend to bind the rollers that are laid in them to support the heavy wire rope that draws the skip. This rope, running down at the rate of 1,500 feet per minute sometimes, I am told, generates sufficient heat to ignite a roller if it happens to be bound so that it will not revolve. Incipient fires of this origin have occurred, not only in the Calumet, but in other mines.”

The mine was finally re-opened in May, 1889.

In his report for the year 1906, Quincy Mining Company General Manager, Charles Lawton, wrote that on July 23 of that year, all underground and surface workers refused to go to work.

“After a few days of idleness, it was termed ‘a strike,'” he wrote, “when all sorts of demands were made by the men.”

There was, in truth, far more to the workers’ demands than that.

A report published by the Historic American Engineering Record (HAER) titled “Quincy Mining Company. HAER MI-2,” listed the demand of a 10 percent wage increase. But also, improved working conditions, including improved safety of the man cars that transported, existing laws that regulated the hoisting of workers be strictly enforced; that water pipes in the mine be maintained in the same condition they were previous to air blasts.

The list of demands, which were by no means unreasonable, concluded with the statement:

“We make the above mentioned demands regarding our own safety as fathers and sustainers of our families, because we understand that our position without the above mentioned betterments is dangerous.”

Next week, when we are together again for coffee, we will look further at the significance of this particular strike and why Lawton should have not dismissed the workers’ demands so quickly. The men received a 5% wage increase, but the safety issues were neither recognized nor addressed.