Calumet and Hecla Consolidated Copper Company

The Calumet and Hecla Consolidated Copper Company, which traces its founding to 1864, was the most successful corporation to have mined native copper on Michigan's Upper Peninsula. Through nearly a century of mining activity, the company produced in excess of 4.5 billion pounds of refined copper and issued over $200 million in shareholder dividends. Unlike many of its competitors along the Keweenaw Peninsula, Calumet and Hecla successfully expanded its operations over several separate mineral bodies, developed capital-intensive ancillary industrial facilities, explored diversified non-mining enterprises, and remained a significant mining corporation at the national and international levels well past the district's most productive era (from "Preserving Copper Country's Mining Records, http://www.archives.gov/nhprc/annotation/march-98/copper-country.html, accessed Feb. 2010).