GRANT TOWNSHIP — It would be no exaggeration for the unincorporated town of Copper Harbor to make the claim that Independence Day was celebrated there before the town existed, or the harbor had been named. In fact, historical documents strongly suggest that Copper Harbor was the first place in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula in which the holiday was celebrated. But that is not the whole of the bragging right for the little town: It was Douglass Houghton and his scientific team who did the celebrating, complete with fireworks — or a reasonable facsimile thereof.

Douglass Houghton, Michigan’s first state geologist, had the task of conducting geological surveys off the state, since Michigan had entered the Union in 1837. In July, 1840, Houghton reached the northern portion of the south shore of Lake Superior long known as Keweenaw Point. The region had been known to the French missionaries and fur traders since the late 1600s, and had been known by the native Anishinaabeg hundreds of years before that.

It was not Houghton’s first time at the place. He had served as surgeon and botanist with Henry R. Schoolcraft’s 1831 and 1832 expeditions to the source of the Mississippi River, and it was during the 1832 expedition that Houghton visited the harbor.

When he was there the first time, though, he knew by the name the French had called it, Gros Marais, or Big Bay. on the eastern arm of Gros Marais was a large outcropping of copper ore that shown green in the water. This the French had named La Roche Verte, or The Green Rock.

During Houghton’s 1840 expedition to the bay, he wrote in his field notes, on July 3: “Examined the vein of copper which gives the harbour its name.” It was Houghton, then, who changed the name of the body of water, probably without intending to.

Bela Hubbard, who was with Houghton that summer, kept a journal of the expedition, as did Charles Penny. Later, Hubbard gave a talk before the Detroit Pioneer Society, Jan., 1874, at which his talk was recorded, and is now in the Library of Congress.

Hubbard related that Houghton team for the expedition was composed of the Houghton; his two assistants, C. C. Douglass and Hubbard; Frederick. Hubbard, in charge of instrumental observations; and, for a part of the way, H. Thielson, a civil engineer, and Charles W. Penny, a young merchant of Detroit, supernumeraries ( along for the ride).

As was stated in Houghton’s notes, he and his team reached Gros Marais on July 3, at which time they examined La roche verte.

“On the third of July, we encamped at Copper Harbor, and spent several days in exploration of the surrounding country, and in blasting for ores,” Hubbard wrote.

Here, he described using the closest thing they could find to use for fireworks the next day’s celebration.

“Several blasts were got ready for the great national jubilee, which we commemorated in the noisy manner usual with Americans, by a grand discharge from the rocks,” he wrote. “We succeeded in producing a tremendous report, and the echo, resounding from the placid water as from a sounding-board, pealed forth in corresponding reverberations for several minutes.”

The fare chosen for their celebration feast would be, by today’s standards, less that desirable, yet Hubbard stated it was equally grand to the report of the explosion of rock.

“It consisted of pigeons, fried and stewed, corn and bean soup, short-cake and hard-tack, pork, and–last but not least–a can of fine oysters, which had been brought along for the occasion,” he wrote. “Truly a sumptuous repast for a party of wilderness vagrants, even on a Fourth of July anniversary!”

This Independence Day celebration, the first recorded in the Upper Peninsula, occurred three years before the United States Senate had ratified the treaty of La Pointe, allowing Americans into the last regions of the Northwest Territory, or the Old Northwest, giving Copper Harbor the bragging rights to the first Fourth of July celebration in the Upper Peninsula.