Inland Steel Company Mining Photo Archive of 33 Large Photographs, Documenting Marquette, MI Iron Mining and Great Lakes Region Steel Industry

Inland Steel Company

Photograph

[Mining][Labor][Steel] Iron mining photographs of Inland Steel Company workers at Greenwood Mine, southwest of Ishpeming, Michigan, documenting the labor system that linked Upper Peninsula ore extraction to steel production in Chicago during the central decades of twentieth century industrial expansion. Greenwood Mine gave the Inland Steel Company, one of Chicago's major steel producers, direct control over a Lake Superior ore source for over 30 years from 1930 to 1962. Underground mining labor in Marquette County was crucial to the manufacturing network that fed construction, transportation, and urban growth across the Great Lakes region. The group shows miners at the rock face, as well as the operating structure of industrial mining, with evidence of planning, inspection, supervision, hoisting, and underground movement that made ore production possible across the mine's thirty two year span, during which Greenwood produced 2.3 million tons of hematite.
Photo archive of 33 Large silver gelatin photographs, each approximately 8 x 10 inches, Greenwood Mine near Ishpeming, Michigan, ca. early 1950s. The photographs include underground tunnel interiors with rail track, timbered passages, rock walls, and miners in hard hats with lamps, heavy boots, and work clothes consulting papers, talking in small groups, operating machinery, and advancing through shaft and drift spaces. Several images show men emerging from the mine, workers gathered near a cage or shaft entrance, a miner swinging a pick underground, and a compact locomotive or ore car apparatus in use below ground. Surface views include the mine headframe and industrial buildings in snow, while administrative scenes show suited officials and workmen around desks and large maps, establishing the connection between engineering oversight and manual extraction. Repeated scenes of miners in conversation, miners and supervisors sharing the same frame, and movement between office, surface plant, and underground workings make the archive specific evidence of how ore mining functioned day to day within a corporate steel supply chain.
Greenwood Mine belongs to the longer history of the Marquette Iron Range, where mining labor shaped settlement, employment, and industrial identity across the western Upper Peninsula, while Inland Steel's ownership of the property places these photographs within the larger story of Chicago's rise as a steel metropolis dependent on raw materials drawn from the Great Lakes hinterland. The archive therefore joins local mining history near Ishpeming and Marquette to the broader pattern by which ore extraction, rail infrastructure, lake shipping, and steel manufacture drove industrial and urban development across the region. Light surface wear, minor corner and edge wear, and occasional handling marks; overall good to very good condition. A strong visual record of mining labor as an operating industrial system within one Inland Steel property tied directly to Great Lakes industrial growth.

Item #23248

Price: $1,250.00