Qualla: Redridge Steel Dam

Redridge Steel Dam: Introduction

Mon, 23 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit CC BY-SA 3.0. Most dams are made of earth, concrete, or stone. The dam across the Salmon Trout River at Redridge, Michigan, is made of steel - thin plates angled against the water, held up by a lattice of girders, looking more like a bridge tipped on its side than anything meant to hold back a river. Completed in 1901, it was one of only three steel dams ever constructed in the United States. The first, the Ashfork-Bainbridge Steel Dam in Arizona, went up in 1898. The last, the Hauser Lake Dam in Montana, failed catastrophically in 1908, roughly fourteen months after its completion in early 1907. The Redridge dam is the survivor - battered, perforated with deliberate holes, its reservoir half-drained, but still standing in the rugged backcountry of Houghton County more than 120 years after the Wisconsin Bridge and Iron Company bolted it together.

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Image: CC BY-SA 3.0

Redridge Steel Dam: Built for Copper, Not for Posterity

Mon, 23 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Photographer: Jet Lowe, Public domain. The dam exists because of stamp mills. In the 1890s, the Atlantic Mining Company needed water - enormous quantities of it - to power the stamp mills that crushed copper-bearing rock along the Lake Superior shore. In 1894, the company built a timber crib dam across the Salmon Trou...

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Image: Photographer: Jet Lowe | Public domain

Redridge Steel Dam: The Engineering Gamble

Mon, 23 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Donovan Squires, CC BY-SA 3.0. Steel dams represented a brief moment of industrial optimism. The concept was elegant: thin steel plates face the water, angled so the water's own weight pushes them into the supporting framework rather than against it. This transfers force to the ground as compression, avoiding ...

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Image: Donovan Squires | CC BY-SA 3.0

Redridge Steel Dam: Easter Morning, 1941

Mon, 23 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit User:Lar, CC BY-SA 4.0. The mines closed, and the dam's purpose died with them. No one maintained the structure. On Easter morning of 1941, the spillway behind the dam gave way, sending a flood downstream. The steel portion itself survived largely intact - a testament to Jackson's design - but with no m...

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Image: User:Lar | CC BY-SA 4.0

Redridge Steel Dam: A Dam Too Historic to Fix, Too Dangerous to Ignore

Mon, 23 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Jonathunder, Public domain. Ownership passed to Stanton Township in 1992, the same year the dam was listed on the National Register of Historic Places. It had already been designated a Michigan Historic Civil Engineering Landmark in 1985. But historic status did not solve the structural dilemma. Michigan's ...

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Image: Jonathunder | Public domain