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Marquette County

Like much of the Upper Peninsula, Marquette County's history begins with the Indian population, which spread throughout the area, then includes the exploration and settlement of French missionaries and fur traders, but reaches its peak in the mining industry.

Marquette County was carved out of Houghton and Chippewa counties in 1843, and named for the Jesuit Father Marquette (1637-1675), an early explorer of the Great Lakes region, particularly Lake Superior and the Mississippi River.

In 1847, just three years after iron ore was discovered near what is now Negaunee, a group of men from the Cleveland area pooled their money to create the Cleveland Iron Company for the purpose of exploring for minerals in the remote wilderness of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula.

In 1850, the state legislature of Michigan granted the renamed Cleveland Iron Mining Company a charter "for the purpose of mining, smelting and manufacturing ores, minerals and metals in the upper peninsula of Michigan."

Shortly thereafter, mining began in earnest at the Cleveland Mine, located just east of what is now Ishpeming, Michigan. Operated in 1853 by the Cleveland Iron Mining Company, the mine produced about 4,000 tons of high-grade iron ore by 1854, which was consumed by various bloomeries in Michigan’s Marquette County.

When construction of the Sault Ste. Marie Ship Canal was completed in 1855, the company shipped 1,449 tons of ore to furnaces located on the lower Great Lakes. During the late 1850s and early 1860s, tonnages shipped by the Cleveland Iron Mining Company grew despite the continual challenges of mining and shipping ores in the rugged, and at times, hostile environment of the Upper Peninsula.

During the Civil War and in the years following, production tonnages increased on a regular basis. In 1880, the Company’s shipments reached the 200,000 ton mark. Up until that time, much of the ore was mined from open pit operations, but as the ore close to the surface became exhausted, it was necessary to begin following the veins of iron underground. That began a period when mining on the Marquette Range became predominantly underground operations. Meanwhile, the Cleveland Iron Mining Company was expanding, adding to the number of mines it owned and operated and also increasing its land holdings.

By 1890, the two major iron mining companies on the Marquette Range were the Cleveland Iron Mining Company and the Iron Cliffs Company. The Iron Cliffs Company had among its founders Samuel J. Tilden, Democratic Party nominee for President of the United States in 1876, who had lost that disputed U.S. presidential election to Rutherford B. Hayes.

The two companies merged to form a new company - The Cleveland-Cliffs Iron Company - in 1891. Subsequent acquisitions, land purchases and mine development left Cleveland-Cliffs as the premiere iron mining company on Michigan’s Marquette Iron Range.

In addition to mining in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, the Company branched out into other areas including the forest industry, creating mills in Alger County, Michigan harvesting northern Michigan’s abundant timber and turning it into wood products. A land department was created in 1896, to oversee the vast acreage and mineral rights that fell under Company control.

Cleveland's interest in the shipping industry dates back to 1867, when the Company acquired half interest in the George Sherman, an ore-carrying vessel, with a capacity of 550 tons. In 1888, the Company built the first steel steamers for the iron ore trade, the Pontiac and the Frontenac. The Company maintained its own fleet of ore carriers until it phased out the marine department in the mid-1980s.

In 1896, convinced that a new rail line could help to reduce shipping costs, The Cleveland-Cliffs Iron Company joined with the Pittsburgh & Lake Angeline Iron Company to organize the Lake Superior & Ishpeming Railway to carry ore from Ishpeming and Negaunee to the docks at Marquette on Lake Superior.

During the first several decades of the 1900s, Cliffs’ iron mining interests expanded into the Mesabi Range in Minnesota but the majority of the Company’s operations remained in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula.

In the 1940s, however, it became apparent that the high-grade, direct-shipping ores mined for nearly a century were beginning to be depleted. The Marquette Iron Range still had millions of tons of the leaner ores, but some method was needed to make the ore useful in the blast furnaces and marketable to steel companies.

Working with the U.S. Bureau of Mines, Cleveland-Cliffs researchers helped to develop the current method of concentrating low-grade iron ore and pelletizing it to provide high-quality iron ore pellets for use in steel making companies’ blast furnaces.

The Company produced its first iron ore pellets at the Eagle Mills pellet plant near Negaunee, Michigan in 1956. While crude by today’s standards, the pellets worked in the blast furnaces and opened the way for the development of the large, capital intensive mining and pellet making operations of today.

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