Qualla: Nonesuch Mine

Nonesuch Mine: Introduction

Mon, 23 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Teeparino (talk) (Uploads), CC BY-SA 3.0. Copper expert Horace Stevens had a gift for understatement. Writing in 1902, he called the Nonesuch Mine's output "the insignificant amount of 180 tons 1,072 pounds of refined copper from one of the richest beds of copper-bearing rock ever opened." The mine had swallowed several fortunes by then, opened and closed five times under five different owners, and turned a profit exactly once - for two years, between 1879 and 1881. Yet Stevens could see what everyone who looked at the Nonesuch Shale could see: the copper was there, millions and millions of pounds of it, locked in sandstone so fine-grained that no technology of the era could pry it loose. The name itself told the story. When Ed Less discovered the vein on the Little Iron River in 1865, he called it "Nonesuch" because no such copper ore existed anywhere else in Michigan's Copper Country. He meant it as a boast. It became a curse.

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Nonesuch Mine: Five Lives, Five Deaths

Mon, 23 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Teeparino (talk) (Uploads), CC BY-SA 3.0. The Nonesuch Mine lived and died on a cycle of hope and physics. First opened in 1867, it drew miners to the southeast corner of what is now the Porcupine Mountains State Park. The copper here was different from the famous native copper deposits elsewhere in the Copper Country. I...

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Nonesuch Mine: Stripped to the Bolts

Mon, 23 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Teeparino (talk) (Uploads), CC BY-SA 3.0. By February 1887, the dream was over again. Workers stripped the Nonesuch Mine of every piece of machinery and hauled it to the dock at Union Bay, where ships carried the equipment to mines that could actually use it. The post office, which had opened in 1876, had already closed....

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Nonesuch Mine: The Problem, Solved

Mon, 23 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Teeparino (talk) (Uploads), CC BY-SA 3.0. Stevens had predicted in 1902 that someone would eventually crack the riddle of the Nonesuch Shale and make "a new crop of millionaires." He was half right. In 1955, the Copper Range Company opened the White Pine mine near the old Nonesuch site, finally solving the problem that h...

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Nonesuch Mine: What the Forest Took Back

Mon, 23 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Teeparino, CC BY-SA 3.0. Today the Nonesuch mine site lies within the Porcupine Mountains Wilderness State Park, swallowed by the dense hardwood and hemlock forest of Michigan's Upper Peninsula. The foundations of the stamp mill still stand, slowly crumbling into the underbrush. The ruins of the chemical...

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