When the Champion mine’s stamp mill closed, in November, 1967, its mill location in Freda was not the only community in the Copper Country to find the silence deafening.

Two months before, on September 11, the last skip load of copper rock was hoisted from the Champion mine’s D shaft to transported by rail to Freda. It was the last time residents of Painesdale would hear the skips being dumped in the shaft house. The closure ended 67 years of mining in Houghton County by the Copper Range Company.

While the Champion did not produce copper after September, 1967, its machine shop continued to do repair work for the White Pine mine.

At the same time, Copper Range transferred the Champion D Shaft (No.4 shaft), its hoist and support buildings to Adams Township. For decades, the Champion had provided water to residents of the township, including the village of South Range, as well as much of the Portage Lake district.

While not the largest, nor the richest, of the Michigan native copper mining companies, the Copper Range Company left a series of legacies that are still present along the spine of the Keweenaw Peninsula to this day. Among them is the Twin Lakes State Park.

In July, 1964, the state of Michigan held a dedication ceremony at the new Twin Lakes State Park, on M-26, about 26 miles southwest of Houghton and about 15 miles northeast of Mass City.

During the ceremony, Copper Range Vice President Bill Nicholls presented the deed for 150 acres of Copper Range land for the enlargement of the park.

The Copper Range Newsletter for August reported that the original 22-acre site to Houghton County by Copper Range in February, 1928, with the provision in the deed that “the premises shall be used as a public park and playground and for no other purposes whatsoever”. Twin Lakes, Lake Gerald and Lake Roland, were on the Copper Range Railroad line between Houghton and Rockland. The railroad maintained three stations in the area: Station No. 23, near Lake Roland; one at Lake Gerald, Station No. 25; and Station No. 26, at

Twin Lakes, which was the line’s principal station at Twin Lakes. By 1916, there were already many cottages, including the Twin Lakes Lodge, a club house for an organization of businessmen from Houghton.

The park quickly grew in popularity it soon became apparent that the park could be better maintained and utilized if was a state park.

According to the newsletter, Nicholls said: “Copper Range Company has never posted its lands, and looks with favor on having its more than 300 square miles in the Upper Peninsula used for the recreation of the public.”

When the Champion mine shut down, Copper Range’s last remaining presence between Rockland and Houghton was its Copper Range Railroad. The railroad had been contracting in conjunction with the rest of the Copper Country for years.

In June, 1964, the Interstate Commerce Commission granted the CRRR permission to abandon its Atlas Junction to Senter, Lake Linden Junction to Calumet, Calumet Junction to Laurium, Calumet Junction to Nichols, Mohawk to Gay, and discontinuance of operation of the leased Keweenaw Central from Nichols to Fulton, 33 percent of the line’s trackage.

In November, 1967, the CRR ran its last train on the branch to Freda.

In 1899, the railroad was just one element of a larger vision, a subsidiary of a larger company.

The Copper Range Company was organized in 1899 under the leadership of William A. Paine, co-founder and senior partner of the investment bank Paine-Webber & Company, of Boston. Paine organized the Copper Range Company as a parent company of two subsidiaries he organized, the Copper Range Railroad and the Champion Copper Company.

In 1902, CRC was reorganized as the Copper Range Consolidated Company; its annual report for 1902 stated the company was “formed to consolidate the Baltic Mining Company and the Copper Range Company of Michigan.”

The consolidation did not initially include the nearby Trimountain Mining Company, but it came under the Copper Range umbrella in 1925, as did the Atlantic Mining Company.

The Champion, Baltic, and Trimountain mines grew up together, all mining the Baltic copper lode. The

The Baltic Mining Company, the oldest of the three. It was organized in 1897,by John Stanton, of New York. Stanton had been a major influence in Michigan mining for decades, and in fact, he is probably the most overlooked figure in Michigan copper mining development. Stanton first invested in the Central mine, in Keweenaw County, in 1863. Eleven years later, he and Joseph Gay partnered to organize the Atlantic Mining Company, and in the next two decades developed the Wolverine and Mohawk mining companies.

While Paine had organized the Copper Range Company, the Copper Range Railroad, and the Champion Copper Company, Stanton worked closely with him in organizing the Copper Range Consolidated Company in 1902. Paine, Stanton, and Gay controlled nine mines and 30% of Michigan copper production and in 1903, formed the Michigan Smelting Company, at Cowles (Coles) Creek, west of Houghton.

The company handled the copper concentrate from the Atlantic, Champion, Baltic, Trimountain, Mohawk and Wolverine mines.

The Trimountain, like the Champion, was organized in 1899. The Trimountain was organized by Harry Fay, whose group also owned the Centennial Mining Company. The Trimountain was absorbed into the Copper Range Consolidated in 1904.

Of the nine mine mines controlled by Gay, Stanton and Fay in 1910, only the Champion was still alive to see World War II. Trimountain shut down permanently in 1930. The Baltic ended production a year later, leaving only the Champion south of Portage Lake.

Of the three big South Range mines, only the Champion lived longer than 34 years. To the north, the Wolverine shut down in 1925, the Mohawk was closed permanently in 1932.

With the loss of rock from those mines, the Michigan Smelter, two miles west of Houghton, shut down in 1944. The facility had six furnaces and was capable of producing 90 million pounds of refined copper per year.

With the closing of many of the Calumet and Hecla mines on the North Range in the 1960s, and the shutdown of the Champion mine, on the South Range, in 1967, along with the closure of the Quincy Reclamation Plant that same year, the Copper Country would not be a U.S. copper producing region for much longer. In fact, it had just one more year to live.