Fayette's Blast Furnace

Fayette State Park, Michigan, in 1981.

The owners of Negaunee's Jackson Mine had a notion that it would be more profitable to manufacture pig iron in the Upper Peninsula than to ship the unprocessed ore down the Lakes. So they scouted around and found a suitable location on Snail Shell Harbor at the north end of Lake Michigan.

This structure, the core of the Fayette operation, was a blast furnace. The furnace was intermittently active from 1867 to 1891, then was abandoned. For well over a century, now, the ruin's been the heart of a ghost town. A surprisingly well-preserved ghost town, actually, as long before it became a state park this village was a tourist attraction.

The furnace was getting major restoration when I began visiting in the late 1970s, but by 1981 they'd restored the stacks and stabilized the deterioration in the rest of the structure.