Pickand’s Coal Dock in the city of Marquette is pictured in 1908. (Photo courtesy of the Library of Congress)

MARQUETTE — A few weeks ago we ran an article about Colonel James Pickands and promised a follow-up about the Chisholms of the Pickands Mather Company. After a slight delay, here it is.

Many of the men who first led the production of iron ore in the Upper Great Lakes came from Cleveland and always retained strong ties to that city, even though they may have spent many decades away from it. The Cleveland natives included both Samuel Livingstone Mather, and Colonel James Pickands, founders of the Pickands Mather Company.

But Alexander D. Chisholm, who headed the Pickands Mather operations in Minnesota and had an ore carrier named after him in 1952, was an exception. He was born on the Gogebic Range, on August 22, 1886, in what would become the town of Bessemer. His parents did not come from Cleveland or one of the other industrial cities of the lower Great Lakes

They were Scottish immigrants who came to the Gogebic range via Canada in the early 1880s.

Alex began working for the historic Newport Mine, located between Bessemer and Iron River, as soon as he graduated from high school in 1903. He began as a chemist in the analytical lab, followed by stints in underground engineering and operations.

Walter Havighurst’s book Vein of Iron, the Pickands Mather Story, describes Alex as “having an eye for ore,” and indeed, by 1913, just ten years after graduating from high school, he was named superintendent of the nearby Anvil-Palms mine. By 1918 he had managed to serve during World War I and get a degree from the University of Wisconsin and was back at the Anvil-Palms mine. In 1927 he became the manager of all Pickands Mather operations in Michigan. In 1931 he was transferred to Duluth, where he was steadily promoted until 1942, when he was made a partner in charge of all the Pickands Mather iron ore operations.

Since the Interlake Steamship Company was a division of the Pickands Mather Company and already had ore carriers named after Pickands and Mather– it is not a surprise that in 1952 one of the fleet’s ships was named the SS Alex D. Chisholm. An interesting footnote, however, is that the ship had previously been named the Elton Hoyt II, after a man of that name who was president of both the Mather Iron Company and the Interlake Steamship Company. The boat was being renamed after Chisholm so that the Hoyt name could be given to a new ship then under construction. In 2003 the new SS Elton Hoyt II was sold to a Canadian company and still visits Marquette under its current name, the Michipicoten.

But to wrench the story back to Marquette, the Mining Journal article from April 1952 about the Duluth christening of the Alex D. Chisholm, mentioned that five people from Marquette attended the ceremony, including Alex’s son, also Alexander D. Chisholm, but called by his middle name, Dougal.

Ever since Civil War veteran James Pickands came to Marquette and opened a hardware store in 1857, the James Pickands Company–and later the Pickands Mather Company–had maintained a strong business presence in Marquette. Dougal Chisholm was one of two of Alex’s sons who joined the corporation. His brother Donald remained in Duluth, where he became general manager of the Lake Superior Mining Division. But Dougal came to Marquette, where he was general manager of James Pickands and Co–the original Marquette corporation– general manager of the Portage Dock and Coal Company in Hancock, and in charge of all of Pickands coal sales in the Upper Peninsula.

Although the Pickands office was at 213 N. Front Street, in the same building that housed the Marquette County Historical Society for many years, the Pickands coal dock in the lower harbor was certainly the most visible sign of the company’s presence. Though not as dramatic as the huge cranes of the competing Spear coal dock to the north, or the massive lower harbor ore dock to the south, it was still an imposing sight.

In his book Deckhand: Life on the Freighters on the Great Lakes, Nelson Haydamaker describes the approach to the Marquette dock with a load of coal in the summer of 1962. “It was a large flat area, covered with a layer of fine black dust. Every step the deckhands took on the pier raised a small cloud. That’s how it is around the Great Lakes ore docks: if it’s not black or red dust it’s black or red mud. Before long we were tied up and the steam powered single unloader began removing 20,000 tons of coal from the cargo holds.”

The Marquette office closed in the early 1970s. By that time, Dougal Chisholm had already been transferred to Cleveland, where he retired as manager of the company’s dock division. He died there in 1995. The Pickards Mather mining operations were sold to Cleveland Cliffs in 1986. The Interlake Steamship Company is now privately owned. The SS Alex D. Chisholm, which operated for an amazing 107 years under six different names, is now reduced to a barge, but as a cement carrier called the St. Mary’s Challenger, based in Muskegon, still works the Great Lakes.

Although none of the Chisholms have lived in Marquette since the 1960s, the front page of the Mining Journal on February 9, 2013, featured a color photo of another descendent of Alex Chisholm. The photo shows Sallie “Penny” Chisholm, Dougal’s daughter and Marquette Senior High School graduate in the class of 1965, with President Barack Obama, who had just awarded her the National Medal of Science.

In the article she says that she actually planned to be in Marquette that weekend for a cross-country ski weekend with high school friends when she got the call that she was expected at the White House instead. Penny’s many scholarly works on her “beloved prochlorococcus” (a type of plankton) may be beyond the lay reader, but she has also written a delightful set of illustrated science books for children, including the most recent River of Sunlight: How the Sun Moves Water Around the Earth, available at the Peter White Public Library.

Penny Chisholm credits her junior high science teacher, Marquette historian and mayor Fred Rydholm, with her love of science. But perhaps some of it also came from a grandfather with an “eye for ore.”