"Houtghton, MI" a Houghton Travel Page by jfreddie

If you like snow this is the place for you. I spent my first year of college here at Michingan Technological University.

The area around Houghton is really cool. There are so many remains of old mining stuff out in the middle of nowhere. You will find half walls and broken train bridges in the middle of a forest and nothing around. Ruins of old mining buildings and smokestacks can be found almost anywhere along the roads.

The bridge shown here is the gateway to the Keweenaw peninsula.

This is the Quincy mine that sits on top of the hill across the channel in Hancock. With the bridge I always thought of this as a trademark of the city. I feel this way beacause when you come into Houghton on Hwy 45 and you come around the bend and the city comes into view, the quincy mine will always catch your eye.

This huge Dredger is really cool.

It was used by the Quincy mining company until 1967. During the mining days copper was mined from the rocks with the help of stamp mills. The stamp mills would crush the brittle rock leaving the copper behind. All the remains would create stamp sand dunes that you will find all over the countryside. They were also dumped on the shoreline of Lake Superior as well as the channel between hoguhton and Hancock. This dredger was used to get back all that stamp sand that was dumped in because new technology allowed the miners to get more copper out of the tailings.