Part One

For decades before the onset of the Great Depression, mineral producers throughout the Lake Superior copper region suffered from a continually increasing decline in underground workers, particularly unskilled laborers such as trammers. Also included in the category were, simply, “laborers.” These were the men who moved equipment, ran compressed air lines and water lines, sorted rock underground, and were generally responsible for something called “gobbing,” which including the construction of gob walls. Gobs were a slang term for waste rock left underground. At one time, waste rock was hoisted the surface and dumped in convenient places near the shaft. At the same time, forests of logs were brought into the mines to become “stulls,” supporting weak areas of the hanging wall. As the mines went deeper, the weight of the upper zones of the mines increased pressure on the newer, lower zones, making the structure of the overall mine less stable and secure.

As mines increased in length, and depth, hoisting and lowering waste rock and timber proportionately increased in cost. Eliminating the hoisting of waste rock out of the mine became a cost-cutting measure, but it had other advantages as well.

Waste rock could be simply dumped in old, abandoned stopes and drifts, filling them up and providing necessary support and stability to the once mined out rooms. Waste rock also became a very significant material in the building of walls to provide structural support to the roof and walls in the mine. Gobbing also advantages over timbering in that in the humid and wet conditions underground, stulls and other wooden construction eventually rotted, and were no longer useful in supporting weak areas. Gobbing did not decay, so as the downward pressure of the weight caused the roof to settle, the man-made rock walls provided stable construction on which the roof could settle.

“Unskilled labor” remained among the most physically demanding and most hazardous jobs underground, and also the lowest paying. As factories and manufacturing began to expand in other regions, more and more laborers left the mines for these other regions. These industries offered jobs that were not thousands of feet underground where sunlight never shone and the danger of the regions overhead could crush a manned area without warning at any given time.

An odd point to consider in all of this is that as mines went deeper and longer, they required new and always larger machinery. The companies had to contract with manufacturers outside the copper region for that machinery. The Lake Superior copper mines, once thought to be so isolated from the rest of the country, became integrated into the national economy. While the mines were significant producers, they also became significant consumers. At the same time, the expansion of agriculture was made possible by industrial manufacturers meeting the demands of the farmers by designing and manufacturing the equipment farmers were demanding.

“By 1890, the Upper Midwest was firmly integrated into the national economy,” states the Library of Congress, in its essay, American But More So.

The integration of the region into the national economy brought with it centers of heavy industry, the LOC says.

“As we all know, the Detroit area became the preeminent center of that vast industry,” it states. “The Milwaukee area came to specialize in the production of heavy machinery for mines, power plants and heavy machinery, agricultural machinery included.”

A fully-developed railroad system moved the region’s products east through Chicago to New York. In 1900, the Copper Range Railroad connected the Copper Country to that railroad system, opening the region to every city in the United States.

One area of development in which the Copper Country bucked a trend, prevalent elsewhere in the Midwest, however was in agriculture: “By 1900, the farm country and farm towns of the Upper Midwest were emptying out, and cities began to sprawl,” the LOC stated.

What the Michigan Agricultural College, in Lansing, had found, was that the greatest period of agricultural development in the Upper Peninsula occurred between 1900 and 1920.

“During this period, the Quarterly Bulletin of the MAC Experiment Station for May, 1930, “the number of farms and the amount of land in farms doubled.”

the land area in farms was still increasing after that date in five other counties: Delta, Houghton, Iron, Luce and Marquette. In Houghton County, the number of farms had increased from 1,741 in 1920, to 1,840 in 1930. Keweenaw County saw similar increases in that same 10-year period, from 72 to 188 in 1925, to a decline to 102 in 1930, but still an overall increase. Ontonagon County, likewise, increased from 917 farms to 1,134. However, there is something in the report that deserves a much closer look:

“Hay was formerly an important cash crop,” the report states. “The rapid decline in horse population and the resulting decline in the outside demand for hay afffected adversely many areas in this section of the state. The dairy cattle enterprise has expanded to utilize a large portion of the hay which was formerly shipped to outside markets.”

Although a reason for the rapid decline in horse population was not explained, its timing coincides with rise of agricultural manufacturing in Milwaukee.

Edward P. Allis, also famous for manufacturing heavy mining equipment (the Quincy Mining Company had purchased many Allis hoists and compressors), merged with Fraser & Chalmers, Dickson Manufacturing Company, and the Gates Iron Works, all of Chicago, to form the Allis-Chalmers Company, according to the Charles Allis Art Museum. In 1914, the company began producing tractors and agricultural equipment, become a world leader. To distinguish their tractors from competitors’ machines, in 1920 Allis-Chalmers began painting their Persian Orange. John Deere had begun building farm tractors in Moline, Illinois, in 1918; in 1926, the Farmall company began manufacturing tractors in Rock Island, Illinois.

As early as 1907, Henry Ford built his first tractor, calling it initially, an “automobile plow.” As would be expected, Ford became the first in the U.S. farm industry to mass produce tractors. The name was changed to Fordson, a contraction of Henry Ford & Son. By the 1920s, 75 percent of all tractors built in the United States were Fordsons.