By Mary Drew at Pasty Central (Mdrew) on Friday, January 19, 2024 - 07:33 am:
Jeff, Chris and Fritz Dennis recently did some exploring around the Gay Sands where the Mohawk Mill was located and Milled Copper there for years. As you can see, there are still some remnants of the milling process left there, besides all the gray stamp sands under the snow. There is plenty of mining history here, but since I’m not up on the particulars, I’ll share the following excerpt from the KeweenawHistory.org webpage, explaining a little about the Keweenaw’s Mining Heritage:
The legacy of industrial mining - from mill to town to stamp sands to ecological consequences - appears throughout the landscape in and around Gay. Visitors observe the tall smoke stack, the concrete and sandstone mill remains, the rows of company houses, and the extensive shoreline deposits of dark stamp sands that now extend down to the Traverse River Harbor. These scattered remnants are a key example of the “boom and bust” mining heritage at this site. The two Gay mills, some of the most profitable at the time, discharged millions of tons of stamp sand tailings into an enormous pile out from the shoreline into Big Traverse Bay.
This site is representative of many on the Keweenaw, reflecting both rich cultural histories and consequential sites of waste, toxicity, and harm that need to be remediated. Although the mills operated for only about thirty years and built a social and work life for many residents, they left over a 100-year legacy of migrating stamp sands threatening the fishing heritage and beautiful beaches valued in the Keweenaw. Of the three large stamp sand sites in Lake Superior at Freda-Redridge on the western side of the Peninsula, and Sand Point near the foot of Keweenaw Bay, Gay creates the most concern.
If you’d like to continue reading the rest of the story and the steps being taken to remediate the Gay Sands, click on this link: 
