Ironwood, Michigan

 

I hardly expected to find a college town in the far reaches of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, but that’s what Houghton, a former mining town, has evolved into.  It’s Carnegie Library, now the Carnegie Museum, on a steep road up from the Portage Canal that connects the town to Lake Superior, gave a full pictorial history of this town of 8,300, its largest population since its was founded in 1860 and 3,000 more than when its handsome, red-stoned Carnegie was built in 1908.

A set of solar panels in the parking lot of Michigan Technological University is the first site one sees upon approach to the town.  A plaque explains they were a student project designed to provide electricity for the nearby president’s home.  A large dormitory just up the road provides instant evidence that this is no small community college, but a substantial institution with 8,000 students and a faculty and staff of 2,000, by far the largest employer in the town.  

And just across the Canal, the smaller town of Hancock is also home to a university, Finlandia, founded in 1896 as The Suomi College and Theological Seminary to preserve Finnish culture and train ministers for the Lutheran Church.  It is much smaller than Michigan Tech with just four hundred students.  It lives up to its name, changed in 2000, with a Finnish American Culture Center on campus.  

I wouldn’t have ventured across the Canal to Hancock and Finlandia if Jeff H. of the Reader, authority in all things Finnish and Upper Peninsula, hadn’t recommended it.  He also recommended the pasties at a nearby bakery, but neither Finnish Center nor bakery were open in the late afternoon when I came by.  I had to be satisfied with a monument beside the Finnish Center to Lauri “Big Louie” Moilanen, a legendary 8’ 3” Finn, who was born in Finland in 1886 and died in Hancock twenty-seven years later.

When I’m crossed back over to the canal, the late afternoon traffic was gruesome on Highway 26 leaving Houghton for a couple of miles to the Walmart and a cluster of stores including a cannabis outlet.  A large billboard channeling Grant Wood advertised it outside of Houghton.  Such billboards have outnumbered the obnoxious personal injury attorney billboards that are a pestilence around larger towns.  The most common billboards though have been those seeking workers offering high wages and benefits and to train.  There is a tremendous labor shortage, especially if one is to believe MacDonald’s.

Beyond the Walmart I had the road and the stunning changing-of-the-leaves scenery to myself.  It was nothing but forest for a hundred miles to Ironwood on the border with Wisconsin.  There was no sign of agriculture other than occasional advertisements for wild rice, including one of soup, and blueberry juice.  What few logging trucks that passed gave me plenty of space.

Ironwood joins Iron Mountain and Iron River as towns in the U.P. who adopted names relating to the mining that established them and is now long gone.  Ironwood is one of seven towns in the U.P. with a Carnegie, all of which still stand, unlike the rest of the state where eleven of the fifty-four in the lower Peninsula have been razed, including three of Detroit’s eight.   

I had visited the Ironwood Carnegie three years ago on a drive across the state with Janina on our way to Telluride after attending the Traverse City Film Festival.  We didn’t have the time to make detours to the four I gathered on this trip.  I was happy to drop in on it again, especially since it still functioned as a library, just one of two in the U.P. And also because I hadn’t had a library visit since Houghton.  There were a couple in small towns along the way, but they had limited hours and weren’t open when I stopped by. The only thing better than visiting a Carnegie for the first time is returning to it years later.  And it is always much more satisfying to arrive by bike than by automobile.

Ironwood’s Carnegie is a relic, little different than when it was built in 1901.  A bond issue to expand it failed.  “Carnegie” is fully acknowledged with a sign out front announcing “Ironwood Carnegie Library” and a plaque beside the entry saying it had been placed on the Register of National Historic Places, as well as “Carnegie Library” in bold letters chiseled into the stone above “Free to the People”  above the entry.  It is the oldest still functioning library in the state.  

Rather than the traditional Carnegie portrait, it had a different version with his famous quote about the importance of libraries.  

It faced the circulation desk, now adorned with plexiglass panels.