By the mid-20th century the people who still resided in the Copper Country truly demonstrated a rare quality of resilience and determination. A hundred years before, mining companies controlled just about everything, because they were the sole sources of revenue to develop the region. With very few exceptions, in 1850, if a sawmill existed on a property, that property was owned by a mining company. The Lake Superior Copper Company, on the Eagle River, in Keweenaw Point, was the first recorded company to erect a sawmill in the copper region.

With the exception of the Danial Cash farm, on the Ontonagon River, the earliest mining companies were responsible for the agricultural development in the region. They were also responsible for the first housing projects. Things did not remain like that for very long, though.

In areas where experimental mining ventures became long-term concerns, independently owned sawmills began to appear, selling lumber to business developers and private home builders.

Toward the end of the 19th century and into the 20th, farming became a significant part of the region’s economy, as did commercial lumbering. It was around the turn of the 20th century that local “community leaders” began to think of ways to promote regional tourism.

By the mid-20th century, the mining industry was still the backbone of the regional economy, but with the exception of the White Pine mine, those days were numbered. The native copper mines on the Keweenaw Peninsula were in rapid decline. But the White Pine mine, opened on a copper sulfide lode in 1954 became one of the nation’s richest producers in just a year.

A state-of-the-art complex, the White Pine’s processing plants looked like no other mining plant Michigan seen up to that time. To many Copper Country residents, it was the future arriving today. Some miles away, however, in Houghton County, there were the old, abandoned ventures, like the Quincy mine, atop the hill overlooking Portage Lake and the village of Houghton. From the crest of the hill, one could look down from the old Quincy location onto Hancock, across the lake to Houghton and see the abandoned Isle Royale and Huron mine buildings in the distance. But looking out from the top of Quincy Hill, any view of the future was far beyond the horizon.

Where White Pine represented modern mineral processing, Quincy represented the past glory of a now dying industry. The past glory of the Copper Country, however, became a concept of a handful of local planners.

For decades, motorists had driven from other states and regions to experience the Copper Country and its scenic wonders, driving past the remains of once highly productive copper mines and, at times, through ghost towns. Why not give the touring motorists an opportunity to experience the past firsthand? Take a break from driving; park the car; walk into the mining region’s past; feel the atmosphere, the dank, cold, musty air and the water dripping in an actual mine. It was this idea that inspired the creation of the Arcadian Copper Mine Tours.

Under the management of Abel Matero and Louis Koepel, the Arcadian mine was actually little more than an adit in the base of the hill, in Ripley, on May 15, 1950.

The original Arcadian mine was an old one, dating back to the 1850s, just north of the Quincy mine, on land set aside by the Pewabic Mining Company. To make a long story short, in the late 1930s, a wholesale fruit merchant named Ralph Paoli decided he would search for copper by exploring the base of the hill through adits. Paoli, it was rumored, opened the adits with funding from Metals Reserve contracts. He died in 1942, no copper was found, and local residents said Paoli used government money to open the adit as a naturally refrigerated storage unit for his wholesale fruit business. The Arcadian was given the nickname, “Banana Mine.” Whether there is any truth to that is a matter of speculation and rumor. What isn’t speculative, however, is that Paoli’s efforts, while not what he had intended, had a more significant impact on the Copper Country than he had envisioned.

Emily Riipa Schwiebert, in 2021, published an article on the Michigan Tech Archives Blog, Flashback Friday, wrote that the new Arcadian Copper Mine Tours emphasized the authenticity of a real mining experience.

“Although anyone raised in the Copper Country would understand the basic vocabulary of mining and the patterns of a mining economy,” Schwiegert wrote, “only underground workers or mining engineers in training tended to know what it was like to set foot in a mine. Arcadian promised to change that.”

She went on to write, quoting an Arcadian press release: “Tourists [are] finally able to see the actual workings of a native copper mine and become acquainted with the geology, mining methods and the mining history of the first largest copper mining development in the United States,” Its operators promised a demonstration of workings identical to those in more typical shaft mines.

At its peak, 20,000 people took the Arcadian tour in a summer, Schwiegert wrote, with the average gate count totaling around 15,000 annual guests. Locals visited Arcadian in significant numbers, and tourists from the Lower Peninsula, Illinois, and Ohio filled the remaining slots. The opening of the Mackinac Bridge on November 1, 1957 proved an astonishing boon for the Arcadian. With downstaters no longer required to wait for a car ferry or drive the long way around Lake Michigan, the Upper Peninsula was now more accessible and alluring than ever. People drove north from the Motor City and trekked up from Grand Rapids, and Arcadian’s billboards beckoned them to Ripley.

While to local residents, White Pine looked like a science-fiction scene, while the Arcadian mine was a nostalgic glimpse of the past. At Ripley, people could now walk into a world beneath the past that they knew but had not seen; they could see and experience a mine in a way previously reserved only to those who opened and worked them.