A cordwood chopper’s house at Coalwood. (Photo courtesy of Reino and Elaine Lintula).

Archaeologists from the Industrial Heritage and Archaeology program at Michigan Tech University, directed by Dr. LouAnn Wurst, have teamed up with the Hiawatha National Forest to investigate a series of cordwood lumber camps in

Alger County near Munising. These camps were run by the Cleveland Cliffs Iron Company (CCI) to produce cordwood for their blast furnaces. Most of our work has focused on the Coalwood District, one of the first lumber districts explicitly planned by CCI which operated from 1901-1912.

CCI was primarily an iron ore mining company and reducing costs and forward integration were key aspects of their business model. CCI purchased railroads and cargo ships to reduce the costs of transporting their high-bulk commodity.

They developed their cordwood operations to avoid having to rely on imported coal, hence the name ‘Coalwood,’ and developed hydro-electric power to control their energy costs.

They bought out less-successful competitors, such as Iron Cliffs and Jackson Iron, and the capital they acquired included the Carp River and Pioneer Furnaces which they continued to operate as well as expanding into wood chemical production. They actively created markets for all of their resources or by-products through joint stock agreements with the Munising Woodenware factory, the Munising Tannery and the Munising paper mill among others.

Company records make it clear that the industrial development of Munising was a mechanism to concentrate labor to reduce its cost as well as utilizing otherwise unneeded raw materials.

The choppers who lived in these camps were paid by the cord. The figures varied from .75¢ to $1.25 although the company worked very hard to keep these figures as low as possible. As a result, CCI constantly faced labor shortages and regularly bemoaned their inability to attract and retain productive workers.

This highlights the real contradiction of having labor concentrated to extract a finite resource and paying choppers by the cord produced. As timber resources diminished, workers productivity would have decreased as well since the choppers would spend more time traveling to timber stands than cutting wood.

CCI’s preference was to hire married men to work and live at the camps with their families. From CCI’s point of view, men with families were less likely to engage in labor disputes or ‘vote with their feet.’ CCI also did not have to provide room or board for the choppers since they were supplied by the unpaid labor of their wives and children.

This combined household labor may have supported the family in ways that piece work on diminishing timber stand would not. From the archaeological point of view, the presence of families resulted in a large and diverse assemblages of domestic artifacts that are unusual for typical lumber camps.

Because of their business model, CCI’s cordwood camps are pretty different than typical northern lumber camps. CCI invested as little as possible in camp infrastructure. They allowed others to construct and operate the boarding houses and camp store or built them themselves and sold them to others to operate.

CCI’s only cost was clearing the site and digging the well, and the tenants paid a fee to access the water. Thus, in many ways these camps formed themselves, as workers flocked to the area and built their own dwellings.

Given this context, our research project focuses on the everyday life of the workers and their families who lived in these camps. Specifically, we want to understand how they structured their lives given CCI’s hands off approach and why workers stayed as timber resources became depleted and their wages suffered.

Over several field seasons, we have excavated at three sites in the Coalwood District: Coalwood, Roscoe, and Zerbal. At Coalwood, we focused on the camp office, the store, three different worker’s houses, and a large boarding house, along with associated features. At Roscoe we targeted two different boarding houses with associated features and excavated two privies and several yard areas at Zerbal.

These excavations yielded a sample of almost 72,000 artifacts that we have used to address many aspects of the workers’ everyday lives. Specifically, our interpretations have emphasized the houses the workers built, diet and foodways, artifacts related to timber and domestic production, aspects of collective or communal activities, and archaeological data that speaks to workers care and concern for others and human dignity.

More details about this project will be presented at a talk at the Marquette Regional History Center, at 6:30 p.m. Wednesday, June 1.

This is a great opportunity to learn more about the archaeology of CCI’s cordwood choppers and last summer’s fieldwork that focused on expanding the project to examine how these choppers’ everyday life changed over time.