The men who were involved in the development of the Calumet and Hecla mining companies — Ed Hulbert, Alexander Agassiz, Timothy O’Shea and others — may or may not have been aware of it at the time, but a major component of the companies’ meteoric rise to prominence was time and space, being in the right place at the right time.

The Cliff Mine, on Keweenaw Point, had been producing copper since 1846, the same year explorations for copper began by the men who would organize Quincy Mining Company. A few years later, in 1849, the Minesota Mine was organized and would very soon rival the Cliff for production of mass copper. But while the frontier was developing on both ends of the Lake Superior copper range, it would be two decades before Edwin J. Hulbert uncovered the Calumet Conglomerate Lode that would catapult the region to world prominence.

Hulbert did not set out to discover the richest conglomerate lode in the world; he set out to survey a road from Copper Harbor to Hancock. While doing so, he discovered the copper lode, upon which he organized Hulbert Mining Company. When the property became Calumet Mining Company and Agassiz arrived on the site as superintendent in March 1867, he was taking the reins when new technology was already being implemented at other, older mines. For instance, when he designed the stamp mills on Torch Lake, he did not consider installing the typical gravity drop stamps in use at most of the other companies in the region.

As early as 1858, Pewabic Mining Company experimented with Ball’s steam stamps. Running trials and tests, they compared the stamps’ output to those of the Cliff and the Minesota mines’ gravity stamps, and published their findings in the 1859 annual report of the Pewabic Mining Company. Agassiz was a mining engineer. He had the education to accurately interpret the data published in the Pewabic’s report. Ball’s stamps were quickly adopted at other mills around the Copper Country, of which Agassiz was aware.

When he planned the construction of the Hecla mill, on Torch Lake, he located a battery of two Ball’s stamps for sale by a local company; two batteries were ordered for the Calumet mine mill.

Agassiz was also aware that the Bohemian Mine, in 1863, was the first in the region to adapt Ely Whitney Blake’s rock crusher, which was patented in 1858. Blake invented the mechanical rock breaker for road construction in Connecticut, but it was quickly adopted in Michigan mines to crush mine rock before sending it to the stamp mill, making ore roasting obsolete.

On the local level, John Collum, an engineer at Huron Mine, invented the Collum jig in the 1850s, which advanced extractive metallurgy at the mills.

All of the above are just a few examples of metallurgical advancements at Agassiz’s disposal, and his mills received the benefits of the trials and errors of preceding attempts at companies before the Calumet and the Hecla mines came along.

These were all developments that O’Shea saw while he was employed at the Calumet mine. O’Shea witnessed the region’s transition from a frontier to an established community, to the nation’s most developed industrial complex and the community it supported. In his self-published book, Calumet Copper and People, author and historian Arthur Thurner, wrote that in a sense, Agassiz was the architect of the community that developed around the Calumet and Hecla ventures.

“Agassiz and his associates helped develop a community meeting needs often ignored or neglected in comparable company towns,” Thurner wrote. Agassiz was responsible for much of the community’s construction, but not all of it, although it is a difficult history to put together; accurate documentation is scarce, and those documents that are available often contradict each other.

Calumet Mining Company was organized in 1865; Hecla Mining Company, a year later. The two companies, both under the same ownership, were merged in 1871. The new company stretched for a length of two miles and sat atop the only length of the Calumet Conglomerate Lode of real value. Housing communities stretched the same distance.

O’Shea was at Calumet less than a year when the Houghton County Board of Supervisors set off the northern portion of Franklin Township to form Calumet Township, on Nov. 27, 1866, the same year Hecla Mining Company was organized.

“In Calumet proper there is no city, town nor village organization,” the 1916 Calumet & Hecla Mining Co. semi-centennial publication stated, “the only local government being the Township Board, composed of the Supervisor, Clerk and two Justices of the Peace.” This wasn’t quite true, however. The village of Red Jacket was the business and shopping center of the township.

As stated in the Village of Calumet, Michigan, 1875-1975: Souvenir Centennial Book:

“Red Jacket was ‘town’ for the many people who lived in the surrounding mining areas — Calumet, Hecla, Blue Jacket, Yellow Jacket, Tamarack, Albion, Raymbaultown, and Red Jacket Shaft.”

Red Jacket Village was incorporated in 1875. Peter Ruppe was elected to village presidency, and Joseph Wertin (Vertin), Henry Northy, D.D. Murphy, Martin Foley, Michael Borgo and Joseph Hermann were the first trustees. All of them were businessmen and many of the buildings that contained their businesses still stand in the village.

Returning to the topic of being in the right place at the right time, another significant departure from Lake Superior copper district mines organized earlier, Agassiz appears to have never concerned himself with creating a company farm for hay and oats for teams, or tracts for vegetables for workers and their families. From the time development of the mines began, though, Agassiz did not want residences or businesses encroaching on land reserved for surface operations near the shafts. To prevent that, he created what in New England was referred to as a common. Calumet Common was a wide buffer between the mines and what became Red Jacket and was available for local residents to pasture their milk cows, if they owned one. It was also used for recreational activities. A baseball diamond was made on the common.

The mining areas continued to grow. Red Jacket continued to increase its number of business offerings, along with lawyers, doctors, dentists and the like. In a very short time, the area had grown since O’Shea arrived in December 1865, when there was not so much as a house for he and his wife to occupy. O’Shea was able to occupy one of the company’s new houses in 1867, when his wife was finally able to join him from Clifton. From their parlor window, the O’Sheas watched the transition of the region from a frontier wilderness to a modern metropolitan hub in the span of just a decade, the partial result of the mining companies being in the right place at the right time.