Almost every day I drive by the Quincy #2 dredge on my way to school and wonder what its significance was. So I took some pictures early this morning as the fog was lifting away and googled some information on it when I got home. This is what I found...
(http://keweenawfreeguide.com/quincy-dredge/)
The mining of Torch Lake did not require drills but instead relied on the use of large boats called dredges. Essentially large vacuums, these boats could suck up sands from the bottom of the lake by means of a long snout lowered down into the water. The recovered sands would then be sent back to shore along a floating conveyor belt. The belt was supported by a long pontoon line stretching between the shore and the dredge. On shore those sands would be reprocessed at the Reclamation Plant.
The dredge seen on shore today is in fact Quincy’s second dredge (Dredge No. 2), its first one having sunk while in lay-up over the winter. This second dredge was first used by C&H to reprocess their own sands before it was sold to Quincy. The second hand dredge continued to serve Quincy for close to a decade before it too sunk during a winter lay-up. By that time copper prices were too low for even Reclamation to pull a profit so Quincy abandoned both the Dredge and Reclamation plant.
Here are some pictures I took...
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