Copper mill ruin stands watch over remote Lake Superior village

FREDA, MI — A mighty stamp mill once stood on the edge of Lake Superior’s red sandstone cliffs. Now, only its crumbled ruin and a tiny village remain.

About 15 miles west of Houghton on the western shore of the Keweenaw Peninsula is the village of Freda, where a smokestack and concrete foundation mark where the Champion Mining Company once crushed copper ore.

Freda is the end of the road. There’s one way in and out of the village, which developed in the early 1900s around the mill.

Freda featured two bars, churches, a large boarding house, a post office and a fire department and the village housed about 850 people at its peak. Freda fell quiet after the mill closed in 1967. Today, about 40 residents remain.

“There’s no young children anymore,” said Clyde Durocher, 84, a retired schoolteacher who runs the Freda Cliffs Bed & Breakfast, located in the former mill superintendent’s home.

The clifftop lodging draws visitors who come for outdoor recreation or who’re looking for a quiet getaway within striking distance of tourism spots like Copper Harbor.

“Most of my business is returning people,” said Durocher, who used to run a family restaurant in the village with his brother Leo for about 30 years. “Once they stay here, they come back because they’ve enjoyed the peacefulness. I have a fire pit outside and and they like breakfast and to talk with me while eating. It’s really been successful.”

In its heyday, Freda was a destination for weekend daytrippers who came on the Copper Range Railroad’s Freda Park train for picnicking, live music and a Saturday beer wagon. The park closed in 1917 as train business dwindled due to the emergence of automobiles.

Durocher said the Freda mill was one of several along the western shore of the Keweenaw which crushed copper ore from nearby mines. The mill crushed native copper ore with electric powered impact crushers, whereas most others of the era relied on steam power.

The stamp mills have left another legacy. Along the coast, roughly 90 billion pounds of stamp sand, or crushed waste rock dumped into the lake, is making its way north along the shoreline past the nearby town of Redridge and over the Keweenaw Waterway breakwater.

Unlike stamp sands swallowing parts of the eastern Keweenaw shore, there are no plans in motion to clean up the stamp sand beaches downdrift of Freda and Redridge.

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Copper mill ruin stands watch over remote Lake Superior village