Lost and Found: Identifying Ephemeral Mining Sites At Isle Royale National Park By Reconstructing Government Land Office Survey Paths In GIS

Summary

This is a paper/report submission presented at the 2020 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology.

Isle Royale National Park located in Lake Superior was one of the centers of the nation’s first copper booms. High quality copper veins drew mid-19th century miners looking to stake a claim. By the mid-1850s these initial attempts at mining were met with demise as the remote location and logistical hurtles made extracting copper a costly business. Translating government land ordinance survey notes from 1847 into coordinate geometry and applying them to the public land survey system in GIS, locations for these abandoned mines and related sites were approximated and ground-truthed. Several of these sites, which had not been visited since 1847, were confirmed as a part of section 110 inventorying activities. Surveying these small-scale ephemeral sites was targeted to improve the park’s understanding of this early exploratory mining period which is overshadowed by later more successful mines on the archipelago.  

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• 2020 SHA General Sessions   •
• Society for Historical Archaeology 2020

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Individual & Institutional Roles

Contact(s): Society for Historical Archaeology

Record Identifiers

PaperId(s): 626