page_title: Quincy Smelter
section_title: Operational years
hierarchical_section_title: Quincy Smelter / History / Operational years
caption_attribution_description: English: Map of Quincy Smelting Works. 1989 and 1907
context_page_description: The Quincy Smelter, also known as the Quincy Smelting Works, is a former copper smelter located on the north side of the Keweenaw Waterway in Ripley, Michigan. It is a contributing property of the Quincy Mining Company Historic District, a National Historic Landmark District. The smelter was built in 1898 by the Quincy Mining Company, operating from 1898 to 1931 and again from 1948 to 1971. The smelter was part of a Superfund site from 1986 to 2013.
context_section_description: The Quincy Mining Company incorporated in 1848. Like other mines in the area, Quincy had its own stamp mills, but did not produce enough copper to justify the investment of operating its own smelter. Before 1860, when the Lake Superior Smelter opened in Hancock, copper was shipped out to be smelted in cities such as Boston or Detroit.
  By the late 1890s, the quantity of rock mined by Quincy justified the company building its own smelter. In May 1898, the Quincy Mining Company started construction of the Quincy Smelter on the stamp sands of the old Pewabic mill; Quincy had acquired the Pewabic Mining Company in 1891. The shoreline was dredged and pilings were inserted for the loading dock. This was followed by laying foundations for the primary smelter buildings: the reverberatory furnace building and the cupola furnace building. By the end of 1898, over a dozen buildings had been built on the smelter site. The smelter began operation on December 1, 1898. The smelter was estimated to save the Quincy Mining Company approximately $100,000 per year.
  Aside from processing copper from the Quincy Mine, the smelter also did business with the Franklin, Adventure, Allouez, and Centennial mines.
  As a result of low copper prices and the onset of the Great Depression, the Quincy Mining Company ceased operations on September 22, 1931. The company boarded up facilities including the smelter. The mine itself remained closed from 1931 through 1936, until an increase in copper prices in 1937 prompted reopening the mine. Instead of reopening the Quincy Smelter, smelting was handled by Calumet and Hecla. Because prices remained elevated during World War II, in June 1942 Quincy built a reclamation plant on Torch Lake near its stamp mills to recover copper from the large volume of tailings in the lake. The reclamation plant began operating in November 1943, and made use of a floating dredge that vacuumed tailings from the lake. With the end of the war, copper prices again decreased and the mine ceased operations permanently on September 1, 1945. However, the reclamation project continued as it was very productive and less expensive than mining.
  In June 1948, the Quincy Smelter reopened as Calumet and Hecla was no longer able to meet Quincy's needs. Around the same time, the Copper Range Company closed the Michigan Smelter and contracted its smelting needs with Quincy. Reclamation was interrupted twice: in January 1956 from the loss of one dredge in a storm, and for ten months in 1958. After the loss of the first dredge, Quincy Dredge Number Two operated until the stamp sands were exhausted in 1967. Also in 1967, the last Copper Range mine, the Champion Mine, closed. In 1968, natural gas burners were installed on the number 5 furnace for melting scrap copper until 1971. In 1971, because of new environmental regulations from the state of Michigan, Quincy abandoned the smelter and transferred ownership to the Quincy Development Corporation.
caption: Side-by-side map of smelter site in 1898 and 1907; more than a dozen buildings were built the first year
exif: {}