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The intention of Kinterra Copper LLC to develop the White Pine North Project has recently made national headlines. The plan is to develop this new mine about two miles north of the former White Pine Copper Company mine, which was developed by the Copper Range Company in 1954 and operated until 1995. In its 41-year production, the White Pine Mine produced an incredible 4.2 billion pounds of copper and 47 million ounces (just under three million pounds) of silver. Both the White Pine and the White Pine North are situated on what is known as the Nonesuch Shale Lode.
The lode was first worked in the 1840s. In 1845, Cyrus Mendenhall began developing what he called the Lafayette Mine. The following spring, William Spaulding, working for the Isle Royale and Lake Superior Mining Company, began opening a location on the Nonesuch Lode, about 10 miles from the Lafayette. Spaulding opened the Nonesuch Lode during the spring of 1846. Spaulding and a small crew spent the summer engaged in road and house building, then shaft sinking.
The Isle Royale and Lake Superior Mining Company was organized by two former officers of the American Fur Company, Charles Borup and Charles Oaks, but they subsequently sold the venture to James Close of Ontonagon. The location later became the Union Copper Company. But, like the company before it, the venture failed.
The Nonesuch proved to be a vastly different ore body from the typical amygdaloid and conglomerate copper lodes, along with the fissure veins initially mined in the Lake Superior Copper Mining District. The Nonesuch Lode, by contrast, was a copper sulfide lode that extends over 125 miles across the Western Upper Peninsula and deep into northern Wisconsin.
While the entire shale formation ranges between 500 to 600 feet thick, the copper-bearing zone is concentrated uniformly within the basal 20 to 25 feet of the shale, sitting directly at the contact boundary with the underlying Copper Harbor Conglomerate. There was no technology available in the mid-19th century to process this type of ore.
That is why the Lafayette venture ended in failure. Mendenhall and his investors dumped thousands of dollars into tunneling into the cliffs of the Porcupine Mountains, but they simply couldn’t process the sulfide ore. Like the neighboring Union Mine, Lafayette lacked the massive fissure veins of solid copper found further north in the Keweenaw. By the late 1840s, the Lafayette was broke, the miners were unpaid, and Mendenhall was forced to completely abandon the venture.
In spite of the lack of refining technology, the failure of these early ventures did not dissuade others. High demand for copper during the Civil War attracted renewed interest to the Nonesuch region.
In the winter of 1865-66, Frank Cadotte discovered copper-bearing rock in the bed of the Little Iron River, near the base of the Porcupine Mountains. In 1867, the Nonesuch Mining Company was organized. In 1876, operations were suspended. The two biggest financiers of the mine were two brothers named Wade from Cleveland. According to James K. Jamison in his book, “The Mining Ventures of This Ontonagon Country,” they were not good men to do business with. They bought 20,000 of the available 40,000 shares, later gaining controlling interest. R.P. Wade then elected himself president and called in assessments few others could afford to pay. Their forfeited shares were bought by the Wades, who became the sole owners. In 1874, the mine produced 14 ingot tons of copper, and in 1875, the product increased to 25 ingot tons. But it had cost more to produce the copper than it sold for.
Following R.P. Wade’s death and the subsequent closure of the Nonesuch mine and burning of its stamp mill in 1876, the operation left behind a notable figure: agent Thomas Hooper. A Cornish native who immigrated to America at age 17, Hooper gained extensive early experience at the Quincy, Minesota, and National mines before being tapped at just 22 years old to superintend the reopening of the Union Mine in 1864.
The Union mine was originally owned by the Isle Royale and Lake Superior Mining Company. First operated in 1845, the mine did not survive the development stage and was abandoned in 1846 for lack of mineral content. Nineteen years later, with the Civil War still raging, the price of copper rose to the point at which investors gave the Union venture a second look. In 1864, Thomas Hooper was tasked with getting the mine working again. The war ended a year later, and in 1867, the Union mine was closed.
By the end of the 19th century, geological studies were showing the end of the Calumet and Hecla Mining Company's Calumet Conglomerate Lode. C&H President Alexander Agassiz and Superintendent James McNaughton began looking for new locations to expand the company's lifespan beyond Houghton and Keweenaw counties. This included focusing on properties in Ontonagon County, targeting the old workings on the Nonesuch Lode.
In the company’s Summary of Operations for the year 1906, the results were noted as disappointing. C&H had secured an option on the Nonesuch mine in 1905 for $25,000, which was to expire in June 1907. After drilling a number of holes on the dip of the lode below the old workings and unwatering the mine to run a mill test, the company abandoned the property in 1906, stating the results did not warrant further expenditures.
C&H documentation from 1908 noted better ground on adjoining property to the east near the White Pine lands, despite a highly disturbed and faulted landscape. On April 30, 1909, Agassiz wrote that the company was organizing the White Pine Copper Company to develop the lands carrying the Nonesuch lode, to be conveyed by the Keweenaw Association and others. C&H owned roughly half the shares at a cost of $100,000 advanced for explorations. However, the operation ran into the same barrier as previous ventures: the technology required to economically mill and refine the fine chalcocite shale ore did not exist.
C&H ultimately walked away from the location, and the Copper Range Company subsequently purchased the White Pine site at a public tax auction in May 1929. Copper Range held the property for more than two decades while conducting extensive exploratory drilling and metallurgical testing, eventually achieving an 85 percent copper recovery rate through improved flotation and fine-grinding processes by 1946.
In March 1952, Copper Range organized the White Pine Copper Company as a wholly owned subsidiary and began physical development work on the site. Backed by a $57 million loan from the federal government’s Reconstruction Finance Corporation, construction commenced on the underground mine, mill, smelter, and a master-planned townsite. The operation flourished for 41 years, but eventually ran into federal regulatory barriers over environmental standards.
In 1994, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) ordered the company to drastically clean up the heavy sulfur dioxide and mercury emissions from the on-site smelter stacks under the Clean Air Act. Attempting to bypass a $200 million modern re-engineering cost, management installed makeshift charcoal and fabric filtration systems to trap the exhaust. The workaround failed to meet compliance, and the EPA issued a $4.8 million civil penalty and a federal consent decree, forcing the permanent closure of the smelter in 1994. Without an on-site processing facility, the economics of hauling the low-grade underground ore collapsed, and the original White Pine mine permanently ceased all operations on Sept. 30, 1995.