Cliffs Shaft Mine

About this property

The Cliffs Shaft Mine Museum is a former iron mine, now a heritage museum, located on Euclid Street between Lakeshore Drive and Spruce Street in Ishpeming, Michigan. The museum, operated by "Marquette Range Iron Mining Heritage Theme Park Inc.", celebrates the history of the Marquette Iron Range. The site was designated a state of Michigan historic site in 1973 and placed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1992. The Iron Cliffs Company was established in 1865 by a group of New Yorkers including Samuel J. Tilden. They obtained property in Marquette County and opened their first mine, the Barnum Mine, in 1867. Two shaft, the "A" and "B" were sunk. The company obtained three more mine pits by 1870. In 1877, Iron Cliffs began exploratory drilling on this site overlooking Ishpeming. Drilling uncovered iron ore, and in 1879 the company opened the Cliffs Shaft, then known as the "New Barnum". A new boiler house and engine house were built on the site in the early 1880s. In 1888, the name was changed from "New Barnum" to the "Cliffs Shaft." However, more changes were afoot: in 1891, the assets of the Iron Cliffs Company were merged with that of other iron companies in the area, including the Jackson Mine and the Cleveland Mine, to form the Cleveland-Cliffs Iron Company, with William G. Mather as president of the merged company. A new dry was built after a disastrous fire in 1901. The original timber headframes over the A and B shafts were replaced with concrete headframes in 1919; a larger modern "C" shaft and headframe was built in 1955. The mine was at one time the nation's largest producer of hematite, and shipped ore every year but one from 1887 until its eventual close. Mining at this site continued until 1967, marking the end of underground iron mining in the area. The Cliffs Shaft mine complex was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1992. It is commemorated by a Michigan Historical Marker In 1998, the former owners of the mine donated the majority of the property of the Cliffs Shaft mine to the nonprofit group so that a museum could be created there. The museum opened in 1999. Above ground, the Cliffs Shaft site covers 15 acres and includes three headframes and eight other buildings. The two 1919 headframes, mirror images of each other, are unusual as a collaboration between mining engineers and a professional architect. In 1919, Cliffs Shaft engineers determined that the two wooden headframes atop their A and B shafts were deteriorating and would soon be unsafe. When Cliffs Shaft engineers presented company president William G. Mather with proposals to update the headframes, Mather suggested that, because of the prominence of their location, the headframes combine practicality with architectural beauty. The company retained George Washington Maher, a Prairie School architect from Chicago's Condron Company, to design the new headframes. Maher came up with a distinctive obelisk-shaped, Egyptian Revival design for the headframes.

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Property data from the National Register of Historic Places, National Park Service (public domain).

Description adapted from Wikipedia under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

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