C & H: The Copper Giant

C and H: The Copper Giant. . , The Calumet and Hecla Mining Company extracted copper from the rich Calumet conglomerate from 1866 to 1968. As early as 1870, C and H already produced over half of Michigan's copper and Michigan accounted for 87% of copper mined in America. Between 1880 and 1900 alone the Boston-based company produced dividends of $57 million., C and H's immense profits derived from a work force of mostly immigrant laborers and an impressive array of steam-powered technology, as well as the good fortune of the copper-rich ore body. The company owned some 1,000 dwellings by 1898 and a nearly equal number of employee-built houses on company land. Many paternalistic benefits attracted and held laborers and their families., By the late 1890s, some 50 steam engines powered machinery at the mine site. In 1899, the Michigan Commissioner of Mineral Statistics described the power of C and H's steam engines: "...as much power as is now being generated by the great electric plant at Niagara Falls, and about equal to the power used on an average manufacturing city of 200,000 people.", The company's decline was reflected in a gradual pattern of diminishing numbers for copper production, dividends, and employment from 1919 to its closure in 1968. However, the formidable corporate and industrial buildings still extant attest to the company's greatest prosperity from 1866 to 1919, and are evidence of over a century of hard rock mining.