WINONA – Retired Northern Michigan University professor Michael Loukinen recently produced a one-hour documentary, “Winona: A Copper Mining Ghost Town,” to air on PBS station WNMU at 8 p.m. Wednesday and 6:30 p.m. Sunday.

Winona was once a thriving town of approximately 1,000 people about 33 miles south of Houghton on Highway M-26. Before 1920 when the mine closed, Winona had a hotel, boarding houses, restaurants, a brewery, saloon, stores, boardwalks, five neighborhoods, a dance hall and a barber shop. Today, only a school, a church, and a few homes and residents remain.

“Some of the old foundations are still there,” said resident Steve Saari, who’s father was born in Winona. “It was a boom town that was heavy into mining and logging. Twin Lakes and Duncan were suburbs of Winona. That’s how big it was. Now it’s just a dying town (full of) forgotten history.”

Saari’s wife, Denise, a member and past president of the Elm River Township School Board, said the town has faded from some people’s memory already.

“Some people still don’t know we have a school back here,” she said.

They both have experienced unexplained, largely electrical phenomena in old family homes, giving new meaning to the phrase “ghost town.”

“An ethereal feeling sweeps over me while walking through the remains,” said Loukinen, who is a research sociologist and director of Up North Films. “The ghost town atmosphere is overwhelming; one can almost hear the miners, trains and children playing, and the immigrants speaking ancestral languages.”

Loukinen’s previous work about native Anishinaabe, Finnish American farmers and early woodsman of the Upper Peninsula got him invited in 2006 to film the centennial of the Elm River Township School, now serving just 11 students.

After doing some initial filming, Loukinen put the project on hold until learning one of his first interviewees died. Wilbert Leppanen’s daughter, Patti Leppanen-Whitt, contacted the filmmakers about getting a copy of her father’s interview.

When Loukinen eventually watched it with her, he realized just how much the story meant to Patti and himself.

“In the long run, communities are fragile and memory is usually lost,” Loukinen told The Mining Journal in Marquette. “What I’ve created for Winonans, is some memories of their community that would otherwise have vanished.”

And when the copper was extracted, the companies left, taking enormous profits and leaving behind hazardous waste for taxpayers to clean up.

“After the mine closed, the company shut down the power plant, the electricity, the running water, stopped the trolley service, sold a few of the homes, destroyed the others – I don’t know why – and the people found work in other nearby mining communities for a little while, and also at sawmills,” Loukinen explained. “So that’s how people survived.”

This history has a great deal to teach us, Loukinen said, like holding mines to high environmental standards and being aware of the boom-and-bust” economy they propagate.

“They create jobs for only a limited period and then they’re gone,” he said. “So the lesson is bust follows the boom. And largely the wealth is sent elsewhere.”

But the other lesson Loukinen hopes people derive from the film is the importance of learning and recording family history.

“If we don’t understand the past,” Loukinen said, “Then we don’t understand ourselves in the present.”

“Winona: A Copper Mining Ghost Town” director’s cut adds about 30 minutes to the PBS version and will premiere at the Elm River Township School at 7 p.m. July 30.

Funding for the film was provided by a 2013 Northern Michigan University faculty research grant, Friends of the Michigan Technological University Archives Grant, a sabbatical award, and Michael Loukinen and Elaine Foster.