Among dozens of group photos of copper miners, we have seen young men before, boys going down in to the mines to help support their families, before child labor laws cut back on the practice. But this particular photo looks more like "take-your-son-to-work" day, somewhere back there in the 1800's. This photo is notable for another reason... it was the 10,000th image entered into the Michigan Tech Archives back in 2010. The link is a blog entry by Erik Nordberg, who also appears in the YouTube clip after an incident that occurred almost 2 years later at the Archives. We are thankful for all of the work to preserve history at MTU and all such efforts throughout our culture.

Hope you had a good Thanksgiving. Have a good week :o)

I am always fascinated by the photos of the old mining days. Notice the lunch buckets in the pictures, they had a tray inside of them and lunch went into the top portion and drinking water was in the bottom.

Interesting photo, I like the young journeyman.
That fire could have been disastrous.

I have one of those miner's headlamps, purchased in
Calumet!!! It could be one of those in the picture
above!

What a tremendously rugged group of people.
An interesting factoid I learned during the Quincy
Mine tour was that prior to the use of mechanized
hoisting, when miners had to climb ladders, their
paid time did not start until they climbed all the
way down to their work site. And their paid day
ended before their climb back up.

Indeed, D.A. The workers got paid for a 10 hr day, but those 10 hrs. were at the actual working face; that time did not include the sometimes one hour descent into the mine and the one hour climb back out, all on wooden ladders. I would imagine the workers blessed the gods when the Man-Engine was introduced.....