From Riches to Ruin: The Delaware Mine's Compressor House

Summary

This is a poster submission presented at the 2025 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology.

The second season of Michigan Technological University’s excavations at the Delaware Mine, a copper mine located in Michigan's Keweenaw Peninsula, focused primarily on the compressor house. Built in an attempt to allow the mine to more efficiently mine copper, the compressor house was in use for less than a decade before Delaware’s underground mining ceased. The excavation’s central aim was to reveal structural and use patterns within the building’s interior. Archaeologists revealed sections of the house’s boiler room and various portions of the walls, providing evidence of the building’s separation of the boilers from the compressors, the location of machinery, and insight into the compressor house’s mine rock construction. The results presented here are preliminary, as they are part of a larger thesis project.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for Historical Archaeology 2025   •
• 2025 SHA Poster Submissions

Keywords

Individual & Institutional Roles

Contact(s): Nicole Haddow