The Founding Fathers.

We've paid a lot of visits to museums on our travels over here. It's not what we came here to do, it's just what we've found that interests us now that we're here. To start with it was all about the battle for the nation, the tumultuous times that set the course for the future. But once the British had beaten the French, and then the Americans beaten the British, what then?

History remembers the great characters and great moments in history - Paul Revere's ride, Lincoln's Gettysburg address. But after seeing the work done by the ordinary men and women who risked their lives to conquer the natural resources of this land, we reckon they're the ones who founded this country.

After all, if there's no power to run the lights, if there's no paper made at the mill, or glass ground to fit spectacles, how will our great politicians write and read their speeches? Hmm…

It all had to start somewhere, and the early pioneers who came here started it all.

We visited a delightful logging museum, just down the road from the bread makers. Newberry was a centre for logging, and the museum was set up by volunteers to record a way of life long gone, but not yet quite forgotten. it's a great example of a community effort. There was only one volunteer on duty, and we were left to wander around the exhibits. There were tools and records books laid out to touch and read, as well as delightful original photographs.

The story told was of hardships and hard work. Six days a week in freezing weather cutting and hauling timber. But such was the natural wealth here it was known as the equivalent of the Californian gold rush.

In those days the forests were thought to be inexhaustible, but in around fifty years the whole lot was gone, completely. Billions of board feet of timber felled, cut and shipped out. It's difficult to imagine, but just about all the trees in the forests here are fairly recent growth. Roosevelt's Civilian Conservation Corp's programme in the thirties and forties, instigated to help the USA out of an earlier depression, resulted in about four hundred million trees being planted, a lot of which make up the forests we now see.

All this forest...

...looked a bit like this after the loggers left.

And then there were the miners. We had a guided tour down a copper mine. This was a little different because there was no train and no lights, except for the ones we had on our heads; just Diane, myself, Aprill our guide and a few thousand bats.

Light of my life.

Copper has been worked in Michigan since pre-historic times, which was news to us. Because of the unique geological features in this area, the copper is found as a metal within the rock. Believe it or not, the largest single piece found in this mine was around thirty tons in weight. But the big problem with this sort of find is getting it out of the mine.

 

Bats were snoozing everywhere.

You can't dynamite it, it doesn't fracture like rock and just absorbs the blast. You can't drill it, the drill gets stuck. You have to chisel it out. Which means lots of work, which means lots of cost, which means that this mine never made a profit in its eighty years of operation.

This cavern was all mined out of hard rock.

The miners who worked here came from all over the world, and often couldn't speak each others language, But they worked hard trying to make it a success. In the early days they only had the light of one candle to work by, which they had to buy themselves.

No it's not a light bulb, it's a candle. Three men shared this light for ten hours a day.

They worked in gangs of three for ten hours a day at ten cents an hour. One held the drilling rod, and two pounded the end with their sledgehammers. When the hole was deep enough, in went the powder, the fuse was lit and they hid round the corner, hoping to find copper after the explosion. The rubble was cleared and the whole procedure repeated.

This old air drill looks alien to me.

 Later came air powered drills, which were so noisy deafness was inevitable. What a way to earn a living eh?

Diane does miner.

But huge caverns were torn out of the hillside by these men, and the wealth of the nation grew.








Now we're under no illusion, these men were not working for the greater good, they were working for their own advancement. But if they hadn't risked all in a strange new country, America wouldn't be the country it is today, would it?

The best logger of them all.