Graham Jaehnig/Daily Mining Gazette Calumet Village’s history is tied to the rich Calumet and Hecla Mining Company, which is reflected in the remarkable architecture of the downtown business district.

CALUMET – The year-long celebration of the 150th anniversary of Calumet Village has already begun. Several calls for volunteers for the many upcoming events have been issued since January. For those who missed the invitations, Village Manager and Celebration Planning Committee President Megan Hazelden said there is no deadline on signing up to volunteer.

“We are going to be holding open calls for volunteers and planning sessions for the Village of Calumet’s 150th year celebrations every few weeks,” she said. “There are a lot of ways to get involved. Please join us and become part of history.”

And it is a history worth celebrating. A history that cannot be separated from that of the Calumet and Hecla Mining Company (C&H). Initially, C&H started out as two separate companies that shared one Board of Directors. Both mines were opened on the Calumet Conglomerate copper-bearing lode.

The lode was discovered by a civil engineer who was surveying a road for the state of Michigan, between Copper Harbor and the fledgling village of Hancock, on Portage Lake. The surveyor was Edwin Hulbert.

In his book Calumet Copper and People, author and historian Arthur Thurner wrote that Hulbert helped to plat the Red Jacket settlement, and he claimed credit for selecting the names Calumet, Hecla, and Laurium. In 1856 he reportedly erected the first building in what became Red Jacket, a log house near the present Fifth and Portland Streets, used as a boarding house and managed by Arthur Donald, while Amos Scott and other others helped Hulbert explore and begin mining.

The year, however, is almost certainly incorrect, because in 1856, Hulbert was employed at the Cliff Mine, in Keweenaw County. He was awarded the contract to survey the road in 1859, and did not begin seeing signs of the copper load until the early 1860s. He secured the property and began exploring the lode.

The Calumet & Hecla Semi-Centennial Edition of the Keweenaw Miner reported that in all the years that the company has been doing business there has been but two general stores on the property, the old Calumet store, which was located on what is now Calumet Avenue, and the Hecla store, operated by Charles Briggs, which stood on the site of the Hecla machine shop.

Former C&H superintendent James North Wright wrote in 1895 wrote that the company store was, for the most part, a thing of the past.

“It was necessary in the earlier days, and though usually charging a round profit for its goods, was seldom extortionate.”

Company stores, Write wrote, on most locations were replaced by the merchant who leased from the company his site and paid a good sum for the privilege, while his profits were limited by agreement to a moderate percentage.

The sites were leased on lots previously platted by Hulbert, probably in 1865, in what became the village of Red Jacket.

The village comprised just 26 blocks, but by 1870 had become the central shopping and business district for surrounding C&H mine housing neighborhoods such as Calumet, Hecla, South Hecla, Blue Jacket, Yellow Jacket, Tamarack, Albion, Raymaultown, Red Jacket Shaft, and even Osceola.

The area around C&H’s shafts continued to grow. By 1916, the company owned and rented to its employees 804 dwelling houses and 1,000 other employees own houses on company land.

“The houses are all pumped with Lake Superior water,” Erasmus Moffett wrote in 1903, “and the company removes all garbage and pays taxes on the houses it owns.”

In 1929, according to Arthur Thurner, the need for the eventual changing of Red Jacket’s name is apparent. Both the headquarters area of the mining company and the township were named Calumet. Also, “Calumet” was used to refer collectively to the surrounding mining locations with their shafts and rows of company houses, the village of Laurium which developed as a residential “suburb” and Red Jacket. To add further confusion, the village of Laurium was, until 1895, known as Calumet Village.