Copper Range Company

This article is about the former US mining company. There is a current Australian company named Copper Range Limited.

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The Copper Range Company was a major copper-mining company in the Copper Country of Michigan. It began as the Copper Range Company in the late 1800s as a holding company specializing in shares in the copper mines south of Houghton, Michigan.

Copper Range controlled through share ownership the Copper Range Railroad and the Baltic Mining Company. The Copper Range Railroad served much of the southern part of the Copper Country, and the Baltic Mining Company owned the copper mine at Baltic, Michigan.^[1]

In 1901, the Copper Range Company, prevented by Michigan law from issuing more shares of stock, incorporated a new entity in New Jersey, the Copper Range Consolidated Company. Copper Range Consolidated used its new shares to get control of more copper mining companies by stock swaps. It gained half the stock in the Champion mine. The company swapped shares to acquire nearly all the shares of the Trimountain mine, which had been misrun by its principals, Thomas W. Lawson and Albert C. Burrage. In this way, Copper Range came to own nearly all the copper mines south of Portage Lake, just as the Calumet and Hecla Mining Company owned nearly all the mines north of Portage Lake.^[2]

The Copper Range properties mined copper in the form of native copper in strataform orebodies in the flow tops of Precambrian basalt lava flows. The ore horizons are known locally as amygdaloids, after the amygdaloidal-shaped gas bubbles in the lavas that filled with minerals.

Copper Range shut down the Champion mine, its last of its native copper properties in the 1960s.

Copper Range spun off its wholly-owned subsidiary White Pine Copper Co., which in 1955 opened the White Pine mine at the south end of the copper belt, at White Pine, Michigan, Ontonagon County. The White Pine mine contained a large strataform body of chalcocite-impregnated siltstones and shales of the Precambrian Nonesuch Shale Formation. The White Pine mine produced copper until 1995.

Louisiana Land and Exploration bought Copper Range in 1977, then sold the operation to Echo Bay Mines Limited in 1983. Echo Bay sold the operation to the employees in 1985. The employees sold Copper Range to Metall Mining Corporation in 1989.

See also

Copper mining in Michigan

References