A Spattering of Area History – blog post #5 from the family vacation

   Way back on Monday, September 28, Day 3 of our fall family vacation in northern Wisconsin dawned cloudy and dreary. Temperatures throughout the day ranged from the mid-50s to low-60s with showers off and on and only the rarest glimpses of sun. We weren’t to be discouraged, though; there were so many wilderness sites to see!

First stop, that damp morning was Plummer Mine, which is halfway between Iron Belt and Pence. There is so much mining history in the area. I wish I could keep track of it all and share it with you, but I will leave the research up to you. I rather share pictures

    I’m never quite sure what all these ruins were at one time. Yes, there is a sign with a map of the site, but I can never put it in perspective.

  And with all the brush and trees, it’s hard to see the remains of what were once huge buildings.

  Way in the back, up the hill, in the ruins of the smelting operation, there are several tall walls, with passages in between. Somehow, the dogs got down in there. 

Buddy and Bleu were able to find their way out, jumping up into a hole and escaping. Poor gimpy Wes, however, couldn’t figure it out and couldn’t jump up anywhere anyway. Nick was preparing to scale one of the walls into the abyss, when Val crawled in the way the dogs had come out and gathered Wes up and tossed him back out the hole. I’m not sure at which point in that operation I shot this picture. That hand is kind of creepy, no? 

Next, we drove around the Rose Wreath building in Montreal, which had originally been the machine shop for the Montreal Mine Company. Behind that, down a road with clear “no trespassing” signs, we drove past the remains of another old brick building. I’m not sure what it had been, but surely it had been another building of the MMC. 

  Between those two buildings, Nick told us there had been a grand place known in its day as the Hamilton Club. It had been built as a recreational center for area miners and their families, and had included a hardwood stage, pool tables, bowling lanes, a barbershop, and a soda fountain. It was built in 1918 and reportedly had burned down in 1968. Nick reported though, that when he had worked in nearby Hurley in the summer of 2010, that the building had still been there, probably as a burned-out shell. When he returned the following year, it was gone completely, torn down as an eyesore, no doubt, which is surely a shame.

I’m going to end this one here, as our next stop was at the first of the three waterfalls we visited that day. Each one garnered over fifty pictures, so I can’t rush through them.

  I will tell you that the day continued to be wet, which didn’t deter these three.

  Or these two.